Todd Monken: Message to team after win is "So what, now what?"

The Browns got their first win of the season in Tampa on Sunday and it was also Todd Monken’s first win as an NFL head coach.

It has been almost four decades since Monken took his first college coaching job and the path to getting the victory included a lengthy weather delay before the Browns could shut the door on the Buccaneers for good. On Monday, Monken was asked if he ever thought that his first win would play out that way and his answer transitioned from saying it isn’t about him to offering a reminder that the goal isn’t just to win once.

“It’s a players’ game, and we got a lot to clean up, coaching and playing, and we took a giant step from Week 1 to Week 2,” Monken said, via a transcript from the team. “So that’ll be the message we come back Wednesday is, ‘So what, now what?’ Are we willing to take that same jump? Or is it now, all of a sudden, we’ve arrived, because it’s week to week. You guys saw the scores, you guys know how this goes, every team’s a different matchup, and we didn’t turn the ball over, which helped us. In that first game we turned it over two of the first four drives, so basically, ‘So what, now what?’ What are we going to do this week to continue to improve? And we got the right guys to do it, that’s what I love about our group, because they’re going to be ready to go to work on Wednesday.”

Sustained success has been elusive in Cleveland since the Browns re-entered the league in 1999 and Monken’s response underscores how much the team still has to do in order to get where he wants them to be.