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Much like the Duke Johnson headline earlier, we also had a second story come out on Thursday about the Cleveland Browns, this time regarding the working relationship between head coach Freddie Kitchens and offensive coordinator Todd Monken. First, let’s start with what Mike Silver of the NFL Network said about Monken’s transition to Cleveland “not going as smoothly as planned.”
I also reported that the transition to new OC Todd Monken has not gone as smoothly as planned, resulting in HC Freddie Kitchens playing a greater role in spearheading the offense than originally intended. We'll keep an eye on this as the season approaches
— Michael Silver (@MikeSilver) June 13, 2019
Mary Kay Cabot of the Plain Dealer added this information as a follow-up to Silver’s report, downplaying Kitchens’ greater role on offense as a normal part of the offseason process:
Kitchens has been doing more in offensive meetings the past few weeks, but only because he’s been gathering input from all the assistants and must make decisions on how the scheme will ultimately play out, a source told cleveland.com.
It’s important sometimes not to read too much into details. It’s easy to hear that things with Monken “aren’t going as smoothly as planned,” but that’s not a bad thing. There are so many tasks at work in which I optimistically think one way, and then once I start diving into it, I realize, “ah, crap, this has some more moving pieces than I expected.” And, the fact that Monken is adapting the offense to mesh his scheme with Kitchens’ scheme, it should be expected that there would be some bumps in the road. The surprise would be if things did go extremely smooth, right? Lane Adkins of The OBR echos this mentality:
And for the OC and HC news ---
— LA (@TheRealLA__) June 13, 2019
There isn't an issue between them, they are incorporating the offense, which is predicated primarily on what was run previously, there are additions and changes, but there is no discord
So, like I said to kick off the Duke Johnson post, it is definitely the offseason!