Army’s Jeff Monken is quite literally the safest college football coach in the country. Every day he shows up to work and he’s surrounded by young men who will one day serve as officers in the United States Military. He’s also quite safe in the sense he doesn’t need to worry about being fired any time soon.
In our annual College Football Hot Seat Rankings released on Tuesday, all but one of our voters gave Monken a score of 0 when it comes to the warmth of his seat. The lone voter who gave him a 1 only gave one coach a score of 0 — and it was Colorado’s Deion Sanders.
While Monken doesn’t generate the same type of publicity as his counterpart in Boulder, Colorado, he’s no less revered by those he works for at West Point. The 2025 season will be his 12th with Army, and he’s coming off the program’s first conference title in school history. Of course, while Army first began playing football in 1890, it’s only spent eight of its 134 seasons in a conference at all, but the program’s first dalliance with league play went extremely poorly.
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In seven seasons as a member of Conference USA from 1998 to 2004, the Black Knights went 9-41 in conference play and only 13-67 overall. Monken, in his first season in a conference considered by most to be the best Group of Five league in the country, went undefeated. Army’s only two losses last year were to a Notre Dame team that reached the national title game, and to Navy, which, admittedly, probably dampened the celebration over the conference title.
While few saw Army’s AAC title coming last year, nobody was too surprised by it, either. It’s a testament to the improvement of the program under Monken’s watch.
The Peoria, Illinois, native comes from a family of coaches. His father, Mike, and brother, Tom, are both football coaches. So is his cousin, Todd Monken, who was the offensive coordinator at Georgia for both of its national title seasons in 2021 and 2022 and is now the offensive coordinator of the Baltimore Ravens. There are Monkens coaching football all over the country — at the high school, college and professional levels.
Jeff Monken was a high school coach himself, spending a year at Morton High School in suburban Chicago (full disclosure: I once broke two fingers in a game against Morton, though Monken was not coaching there at the time, so I do not hold him responsible for it). He only spent a season there before moving on to Concordia College before he caught his big break in 1997. That’s when Paul Johnson hired Monken to be his running backs coach at Georgia Southern. It was there, under the future Navy and Georgia Tech coach (Monken followed Johnson to both places before returning to Southern as head coach in 2010), that Monken earned his option bonafides that would one day help him not only get the Army job but serve as the catalyst to turning the program around.
It’s easy to forget now, but the Army program Monken inherited was in poor shape. Life had not improved much after Army left C-USA and returned to being Independent. In 1996, two years before joining C-USA, the program went 10-2 under Bob Sutton. From 1997 to 2013, the program never won more than seven games in a single season. When Monken arrived in 2014, Army was coming off a 3-9 season and was in the midst of a 12-game losing streak to Navy. It was a streak Monken had a hand in creating; it started in 2002, Monken’s first year as Navy’s running backs coach under Johnson.
Monken would lose his first two games against Navy and go 6-18 in those first two seasons, but the turnaround began in 2016. The Knights went 8-5, finishing the regular season with a 21-17 win over Navy to end the streak. They’d beat Navy again in 2017 and 2018, this time capping off consecutive double-digit win seasons.
While Army wouldn’t win 10 games again until last year, Monken’s teams have won at least eight games in six of his 11 seasons. They’d won eight or more games only six times between 1966 and 2015.
That kind of stability is why Monken is one of the safest coaches in the country. It’s also the reason why Army football will forever be safe in Monken’s hands.
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