Bear Digest

Why it's easy to put Todd Monken among finalists for Bears job

Local product has too many positive seasons in the NFL not to be considered for head coach, and even elevated a losing college program as a head coach.
Gene Chamberlain|
Lamar Jackson gets a hug from Todd Monken during a 2024 season when his stats have been elevated to league-high levels.
Lamar Jackson gets a hug from Todd Monken during a 2024 season when his stats have been elevated to league-high levels. | Mitch Stringer-Imagn Images

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Chicago Bears

Todd Monken's credentials for being a head coach look like those a lot of other successful NFL offensive coordinators carry, and the Bears no doubt would be impressed by what he did with Baltimore's Lamar Jackson.

If job favorite Ben Johnson became a difficult hire and the Bears needed to look elsewhere for an offensive side coach, they could do much worse than turn to Monken.

He does have Jackson playing at a level he has never been at since he threw 36 touchdown passes in 2019..

The problem is Jackson has been a head coach and he didn't exactly stack wins over the course of three seasons at Southern Mississippi with a record of 13-25. Then he went back to being an offensive coordinator and has been wildly successful.

The wonderful little back story of the Monken family of coaches aside—he and his brothers coached after his father, Bob, had become an IHSA legend at Lake Park High—Monken really does merit consideration for finalist with the Bears coaching search.

The main reason lies in those three seasons with a terrible record at Southern Miss as the head coach.

What he did was truly remarkable. A 13-25 mark sounds horrible, but he took over a winless team and had 100% more wins in his first year than the previous year. Then he had three wins. Finally, he pulled the program up to nine wins in Year 3 and high-tailed it out of town to be Dirk Koetter's offensive coordinator at Tampa Bay. He elevated the program enough that Jay Hopson took it over and had winning records four straight years afterward until they crashed again.

At age 58, Monken is just an NFL coordinator who slipped through the cracks and never got the head coaching position when it's possible he is head coaching material based on his constant success heading up attacks.

He definitely had John Harbaugh's eye once he became available for hire.

“Man, there’s nothing like the real thing, right?" Harbaugh asked of reporters at offseason practices after hiring Monken. "Seeing Todd in real life is even better than reports I would say,” Harbaugh said in his Thursday press conference. He’s a very good teacher. He does it in a very energetic kind of way, the way that we love to see around here.

"He's just very relatable. He's also a very detailed coach—especially in the passing game—but not just that: the protection, the run game, the quarterback reads, everything. He’s very involved, very hands on. Our coaches over the years have all been like that. Todd is unique in his way of doing it."

An offensive coordinator 13 seasons, including six in the NFL and three for Georgia—one in their unbeaten 2022 season—should be enough to put him even with or above Ben Johnson in terms of successful experience.

The idea Monken is riding on the coat tails of Lamar Jackson is ridiculous, also, because he has elevated Jackson's playing level since becoming the coordinator over what the Ravens QB did under Greg Roman.

With Roman, Jackson never went over 64.4% completions. He's at 66.7% this year after 67.2% last year, both with Monken.

Jackson leads the NFL with a 119.6 passer rating and 8.6 touchdown percentage. He is averaging 8.8 yards per pass attempt. Under Roman, he twice failed to reach 100 passer rating and had a high of 99.3. His yards per attempt were between 6.9 and 7.5.

The only times he had trouble elevating the offense came in his first year under Koetter at Tampa Bay and in his one season, 2019, with Cleveland. But the Browns team had Freddie Kitchens as head coach and was 6-10 with numerous problems. Monken went in 2023 to the Ravens after success at Georgia and the Ravens have to be ranked right with Kansas City and Buffalo to get to the Super Bowl out of the AFC.

No. 1 in the league in offense, third in scoring, first in rushing, seventh in passing and the secret about Monken is out, at least it would appear that way.

At 58 he could finally get that first shot at being an NFL head coach after so long in a secondary role except at Southern Miss.

"When you have a good job and they pay me a lot of money, you have to be careful," Monken was quoted by Georgia Bulldogs on SI as saying in the 2022-23 college playoffs. "The grass isn’t always greener, and money isn’t everything."

The grass is pretty green at Halas Hall at Soldier Field now, not too far from where he was born, after they changed to a Bermunda type of grass. And the money is negotiable.

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Gene Chamberlain
GENE CHAMBERLAIN

Gene Chamberlain has covered the Chicago Bears full time as a beat writer since 1994 and prior to this on a part-time basis for 10 years. He covered the Bears as a beat writer for Suburban Chicago Newspapers, the Daily Southtown, Copley News Service and has been a contributor for the Daily Herald, the Associated Press, Bear Report, CBS Sports.com and The Sporting News. He also has worked a prep sports writer for Tribune Newspapers and Sun-Times newspapers.