INDIANAPOLIS — Former Ravens offensive coordinator Todd Monken looked, above all, comfortable Wednesday afternoon at the NFL scouting combine — or at least comfortable in his choice of uniform for the moment. He was clad head to toe in Nike, including a baby blue Jordan-brand hoodie, gray track pants and sneakers that seemed to glide as much as step from one interview session to another.

He paused when he reached the podium, glanced to either side, smiled and pointed skyward.

“How cool is this?!” he said, wearing the outfit he rushed to buy with the $500 left on his Ravens account with Nike before he left the team. “I’m between Mike Macdonald and Mike Vrabel.”

For Monken, 60, the setting carried a certain symmetry. A month ago, the Cleveland Browns had made the somewhat surprising decision to hand him his first head-coaching job, making him one of the three oldest first-time head coaches in league history — joining David Culley, who was 65 when he took over the Houston Texans for one season in 2021, and Vic Fangio, who was 60 when he became coach of the Denver Broncos in 2019 and now serves as defensive coordinator for the Philadelphia Eagles.

Now, Monken, once the architect of one of the most prolific offenses in NFL history in Baltimore, is the man charged with restoring order to a franchise that has spent much of the past two decades searching for a way out of the abyss. During his three seasons in Baltimore, the Ravens became the first team in league history to throw for at least 4,000 yards and rush for 3,000 in the same season. Quarterback Lamar Jackson claimed a second NFL Most Valuable Player Award and also reached career highs in passing yards and touchdowns.

Cleveland presents, well, a different kind of canvas.

Since 2002, the Browns have reached the playoffs only three times and won just one postseason game. Over the past decade, they have produced only two winning seasons. And the past two years were especially unforgiving: an 8-26 combined record that ultimately cost Kevin Stefanski his job.

Which raises a natural question four weeks into Monken’s tenure: How is he adjusting to the role?

“It’s all the stuff you don’t wanna do,” he said, smiling. “It’s everything besides the X’s and O’s.

“I say that jokingly, but there is a lot more that comes with it.”

Indeed, the job is less the play sheet that would often reside in his waistband than a building — and everything inside it. The training room and the rehabilitation schedules. The weight room and the offseason plans. The logistics of roster building at a time of year when the league gathers here to evaluate possibilities as much as prospects.

Monken suggested that part of the blueprint comes from Baltimore, where the years were productive but, in the end, incomplete. The Ravens entered last season with Super Bowl aspirations and floundered out of the gate, losing five of their first six games before finishing 8-9 and missing the playoffs. Along the way, Jackson missed four games because of injuries and often appeared less than sharp even when available. Some players voiced frustration with what they viewed as a lack of creativity in the offensive design, the defense struggled to protect late leads, and there was a clear disconnect, most notably between Jackson and the coaching staff.

“Unfortunately, we didn’t play winning football enough,” Monken said, citing injuries, turnovers that arrived at inconvenient moments and elements he believes he could have handled better as a coach.

What he took away from that season, he said, was a renewed appreciation for the margins — the small, cumulative details that tend to decide games in a league built on narrow outcomes.

“There’s certain things from a day-to-day basis — from coaching accountability, from playing accountability — that when you’re trying to find those margins that allow you to win those close games that we did have, we didn’t find a way to win those,” he said. “In the years previous, we did.”

Those margins now belong to Cleveland, a division rival in the AFC North with a roster with more questions than answers. The offense finished near the bottom of the league last season and remains unsettled at quarterback, with Deshaun Watson and polarizing second-year player Shedeur Sanders expected to compete for the job.

Monken said that he intends to bring elements of the Ravens’ offensive system with him, though not without modification.

“Well, the Ravens are in our division, so they’ve got all our stuff. We’re gonna have to change some of it for God’s sake,” he said. “We can’t keep the same calls.

“But you are who you are. You may flip some terminology … but what you believe in, how you attack people, how you go about your daily routine, your coaching staff, it’s gotta stay the same. That’s why you got the job. You completely flip, then you’re screwed.”

He also spoke warmly about his former boss in Baltimore, John Harbaugh, who was fired after 18 seasons with the Ravens and is now the coach of the New York Giants.

Asked what distinguishes Harbaugh, Monken paused before settling on a word that coaches rarely use lightly.

“He’s got a gift for confronting anything that gets in the way of winning football without being confrontational,” Monken said. “He just does. It’s unique. He doesn’t let it linger. He’ll come right down the hall and say this isn’t good enough, what can we do to change it and where are we at?

“The other thing is, the offseason’s no joke; John — it’s football every day, man. Every year I was with the Ravens, it was offense 2.0, offense 3.0. What are we going to do to improve?”

In Cleveland, that question will now follow Monken everywhere — through meeting rooms, onto practice fields and into future Sundays.

The answers will eventually surface on the scoreboard, including twice a year against Baltimore, and across the rest of a long, unsentimental calendar.

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