Cleveland Browns Offseason Preview

This is the latest installment in an ongoing series of NFL offseason previews.

2025 Season in a Nutshell

Myles Garrett set the single-season sack record. Otherwise, the 2025 Browns season was a dreary waste of time and energy.

Coaching Situation

Todd Monken was the head coach at Southern Mississippi from 2013-2015, before moving on to Georgia and then the Ravens. The Browns are therefore his second head coaching gig. Someday, the 60-year old Monken might finally get a head coaching opportunity at the NFL level.

Monken accepted the Browns offer after high-profile (Mike McDaniel) and medium-profile (Grant Udinski) candidates withdrew from consideration, and just before John Harbaugh assigned him the offensive coordinator’s parking space at Giants headquarters.

Defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz, irate that the Browns chose a different old guy for an IRA-booster of a late-career temp gig, resigned soon after Monken was hired. Monken, meanwhile, hired Mississippi high school coach John Carr as his chief of staff (Carr once held an administrative role at Southern Miss) and tried to hire former wet bandit Daniel Stern (actually a former Ravens “strategy analyst”) as his Associate Head Coach.

An “associate head coach” and a “chief of staff?” Both of them former coworkers? If I didn’t know better, I might suspect that Monken is using this late-career opportunity to reward old buddies with titles and Jimmy Haslam’s money. At any rate, Stern opted to join the Seahawks instead.