BEREA, Ohio — There were 10 NFL head coaching jobs available this past offseason and most of those teams either had a franchise quarterback, or a clear plan to acquire one. Nothing is more important to a new coach than having that quarterback. It rarely works when they take a job without one.
"Yeah," new Cleveland Browns coach Todd Monken told me. "When you have a choice." The 60-year-old Monken didn’t have one when he was hired by the Browns in January. It was the first NFL head coaching job he had been offered in his 37-year coaching career, and he wasn’t about to turn it down.
But the fact that he inherited a volatile quarterback situation hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm. No, he doesn’t know whether he’ll roll with veteran Deshaun Watson, who hasn’t played since 2024 and hasn’t played well since he last appeared for the Texans in 2020, or second-year pro Shedeur Sanders, who had better publicity than performance as a rookie. It’s possible — maybe even likely — that neither of them will help the Browns win either now or in the future.
But before heading out to practice on Monday, Monken told me he was fine with not diving into the draft or free agency this past spring to find a better answer. He and the Browns thought it would be better to use this year to find out what they’ve got. "We made a decision as an organization, ‘Hey, let’s build the roster.
Let’s see where we’re at and then pivot then,’" Monken told me. "That’s why we stuck with the guys that we had. We might as well exhaust every opportunity to see what we have, because it would’ve been a damn shame to not, and (then) someone goes on to play really well (somewhere else).
‘The guy was in our building for God’s sake!’ "So let’s at least exhaust that and see where we’re at." It certainly could be exhausting because there really has been no indication that either Watson or Sanders can be their long-term answer. At 30 years old, it’s hard to imagine Watson recapturing his Pro Bowl form after playing just 19 games over the past five seasons. And despite the volumes of hype around Sanders last season, he was generally inaccurate (a 56.6 completion percentage) and threw more interceptions than touchdowns (10 to 7).
He was only a rookie, but he didn’t exactly look like a budding star. Which means it’s likely that Cleveland's future quarterback will end up coming from the 2027 NFL Draft. And that’s a shame, because there is a lot to like on the rest of this roster.
On defense, for example, the Browns may have traded away Myles Garrett, the best defender in the NFL. But they replaced him with defensive end Jared Verse, the NFL’s Defensive Rookie of the Year in 2024. And he’s backed by last year’s Defensive Rookie of the Year, linebacker Carson Schwesinger, and Pro Bowl corner Denzel Ward.
On offense, the club has promising skill players such as running back Quinshon Judkins and tight end Harold Fannin and rookie receivers K.C. Concepcion and Denzel Boston, whom they took in the first two rounds of this year’s draft. That’s a lot of talent for the future.
But this is a franchise that has had just five winning seasons over the past three decades. Nobody wants to wait for next year again. "I think the future is very important, but I’m mostly focused on the present before anything else," Verse said.
"I think we’ve got a lot of talent. I think we’ve got a lot of people that can do amazing things. But we need those amazing things today." Unfortunately, it would have to be really "amazing" for those players to do enough today to drag this team toward even respectability without the quarterback mess sorted out.
And it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon. So yes, once again, the present is probably bleak. But that hasn’t dampened Monken’s outlook about what comes next.
"Because I see it," the first-time NFL head coach told me. "I see the young talent. I see the draft capital we have in the future.
I see we’re going to have money. If you didn’t have the young talent, I’d see that. But I see the future.
I see how (GM Andrew Berry) does the draft. We have an ownership that is committed to winning, committed to whatever we need to win. "Now we’ve just got to do our part, which is develop a young roster and find a quarterback." That last part, of course, is the hardest of all.
I get that he wasn’t traded straight up for Myles Garrett. The Browns got first-, second- and third-round draft picks, too. But he’s the piece that is expected to fill Garrett’s shoes — an impossible task given Garrett’s NFL-record 23 sacks last season and the 125.5 sacks he tallied in his nine-year tenure.
The 25-year-old Verse is pretty good, but not in the Garrett stratosphere. He had 7.5 sacks for the Rams last year, his second in the NFL. The Browns had a top-10 defense last year, so they can probably excel even without Garrett’s historic production.
But they are almost certainly hoping Verse will deliver double-digit sacks, at least. After all, defense is probably all that could save this team. It’s why the Browns were competitive at all in a 5-12 mess of a season in 2025.
They still don’t have a quarterback, so they need to disrupt as many opposing QBs as possible to stay in games. Verse offers their best chance to do that. "In California, it doesn’t really rain that much.
I was outside yesterday just enjoying the rain, sitting on my back porch. … I like it here. I wasn’t really distraught at all after the initial shock wore off. I love the organization." — DE Jared Verse on being traded from the Rams to the Browns No Quarterback = No Hope I want to believe.
I really do. But I just can’t see any way in which this Browns team wins more than a handful of games. I might’ve felt differently about them if they appeared to have the defense they had the past couple of years.
But the Myles Garrett trade took care of that. While I think they have some really intriguing young players on offense, it’s meaningless to me until they find a quarterback. And right now, there’s no way to convince me that whatever’s left of Deshaun Watson can be anywhere near the quarterback he was in Houston, before sexual misconduct allegations and injuries derailed his career.
And while I’m not completely dismissing Sheduer Sanders after half of one rookie season, I need to see much more from him before I join the many cheerleaders on his overcrowded bandwagon. If either of those guys turns into a viable quarterback this year, then sure, maybe the Browns have the pieces to surprise me and become a really competitive team. If that happens, though, I won’t be the only one proven wrong.
It’s a special treat for me, because the Bills will be holding another practice at their brand new Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park, N.Y. I’m going to like it because, let’s face it, their old stadium was a dump. And I assume the press box seats aren’t one of the many restricted view seats that have surprised and upset so many Bills season ticket holders.
It’ll take a three-hour drive along the beautiful shores of Lake Erie to get there, though I doubt I can see much from the New York State Thruway. Fun fact: If you continue about a half hour past the stadium, up I-190, you’ll get to Niagara Falls, my old home. My first job was covering the Bills for the Niagara Gazette … a long, long time ago.
I’m still big there, I’m told. Not as big as the expectations on new Bills coach Joe Brady. He replaces Sean McDermott, who did everything in Buffalo except get the Bills to the Super Bowl.
So, yeah, the first-year expectations on the 36-year-old, first-time head coach are very real.
