Boston College Head Coaching Profile: Jeff Monken

Over the last few days, we’ve profiled a few potential head coaching candidates for Boston College. Today we will talk about current Army head coach Jeff Monken.

Monken has been the head coach of Army since 2014. Before that, Monkey served as the head coach of Georgia Southern before they jumped to FBS play after his departure.

The first thing that jumps out on Monken’s resume is success. Of his ten seasons as a head coach, he has had a winning season in seven of them. He led Georgia Southern to three NCAA Division I Semifinals and two Southern Conference championships during his tenure at Georgia Southern.

What’s most impressive, however, is the turnaround Army has experienced with Monken at the helm. A program that was once the punching bag of the NCAA, the Black Knights have shown remarkable improvement. After a slow start to his tenure, Monken has led the Black Knights to two Commander-in Chief trophies in the past two years, and three straight victories over Navy. In 2017 and 2018, Army finished 10-3 and 11-2 respectively.

Clearly Monken is going to have a different sort of rebuild at BC, but he has shown that he can be successful, which for BC fans would be a massive change of pace.

The next thing to look at is the offensive scheme Monken uses. Monken uses the triple option, a possible nod to his time spend at Georgia Tech as an assistant. While certainly run focused, it allows for more creativity, flexibility and, most importantly, unpredictability on the field. With that said, it’s probably worth pausing to note if BC will have the players to run the triple option right away. Monken certainly can run it when he gets his guys in, but Anthony Brown has been a traditional drop-back passer so re-training him to run a different scheme might be a prohibitively difficult problem for him to solve.

Finally, while this might not matter that much given his experience as a head coach, but the level of teams he’s been coaching is not particularly strong. He has spent the last nine years at sub-Power 5 programs. While there is virtually no way of BC getting a head coach from a current Power 5 program, it distinguishes him from the Al Washington’s of the world since he has had less time seeing the inner workings of a Power 5 program. To wit, he has only served as a running backs coach at Power 5 programs sporadically throughout his career.

Overall, Monken is a really good option for the Eagles. He has a history of rebuilding, and he has a history of success, two things that BC really needs right now.