5-3, on track for 8-4 in the regular season.
Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 6-1
2016Heart of Dallas BowlW 38-31
2017Armed Forces BowlW 42-35
2018Armed Forces BowlW 70-14
2020Liberty BowlL 21-24
2021Armed Forces BowlW 24-22
2024Independence BowlW 27-6
2025Fenway BowlW 41-16This week Wed Nov 4
- Last gameL 22-49 at Memphis Sat Oct 31
- This season5-3
- Hot seat5% 52nd of 132
- On track for8-4 regular season
- Nextvs. Air Force Sat Nov 7
- Stature79th of 138 FBS programs
Win and he’s at 4%. Lose and he’s at 7%.
vs. Air Force, Sat Nov 7, 7:30 pm ET · Air Force is 6-2 · Monken vs. Troy Calhoun: 7-5 · Army’s chance to win: 60% (the site’s model)
- If Army wins: 4%, 64th of 132
- Now: 5%
- If Army loses: 7%, 45th of 132
Is he getting fired?
5% chance he’s out after the season · 52nd of 132 FBS head coaches · Cool
If he finishes…
Bar: how likely that finish isNumber: his chance of being out
- 6-611%
- 7-56%
- 8-43%
- 9-31%
Why his number is where it is
Our hot-seat model, on his record so far, the win chances for every game he has left, and his contract (a bigger buyout, relative to pay, makes a change costlier). Ranked against the 132 FBS head coaches with 3+ games this season.
Now cooler than at this point in 2025.
His hot seat, week by week
The chance he’s out by the end of that season, as it stood after every week of his tenure here, by today’s model.
Hottest: 2023, week 9 (32%, 11th-hottest of 133 FBS jobs that week). Top factor: ▲ Hotter Year 10 · tenure, which this model overrates
Earlier seasons price the games left with power ratings rebuilt after those seasons ended.
What drives his number
The biggest factors, each against the typical FBS job today.
- ▲ HotterYear 13 · tenure, which this model overrates
(why?)
Tenure is one of this model’s strongest inputs, but its weight was set when retirements like Nick Saban’s and Bob Stoops’ still counted as being pushed out, so it overstates how much tenure matters. History alone points the other way: of 213 past coaches in year 10 or later at this point in a season, 6% were pushed out over results, against 13% of 1,454 in years 3–9.
- ▼ Cooler5-3, outscoring opponents by 65
- ▼ Cooler19-8 over his previous two seasons here
What happened to coaches like him, 2004–2025
A different comparison: past coaches, not today’s, grouped by one fact at a time. Neither line knows the games he has left or his contract, so they can sit above or below his chance.
- Were 5-3 after 8 games
- 5% pushed out over results · of 502 coaches
- Were in year 10 or later, after 8 games
- 6% pushed out over results · of 213 coaches
How good is this number? Checked on every FBS coach from 2010 to 2025, with its percentages calibrated each season on earlier years only: they track what happened — coaches it put near 25% were out about a quarter of the time — and a version pricing the games left with the previous season’s ratings ranked jobs as well as the ranking this page used before. Each week it learns from coaches who were still on the job at that point, so a firing during the season counts. In the Boiling zone it has run a few points high. Every job, and the method.
His week
No headlines named him in the last 7 days
Offense: 6th of 138 per play. Defense: 120th.
4 games left
- Sat Nov 7vs. Air Force (6-2)
60%
- Sat Nov 21vs. East Carolina (4-4)CBS Sports Network68%
- Sat Nov 28at Rice (1-7)82%
- Sat Dec 12vs. Navy (2-6)
60%
Percent: Army’s chance to win, from the site’s model. Records are through today. Networks as announced; the rest are set closer to kickoff.
How the season got here
Where Army stood among 138 FBS programs by stature after each game (1st is the highest; the CFB Zeitgeist ledger).
- Oct 26–Nov 1L 22-49 at Memphis1 headline · 87th of 138
- Oct 19–25W 38-35 at Tulsa0 headlines
- Oct 12–18W 56-24 vs. Florida Atlantic2 headlines · 74th of 138
- Oct 5–11W 20-17 vs. Tulane0 headlines
- Sep 28–Oct 4L 29-31 at Louisiana Tech0 headlines
- Sep 21–27 · rebuiltW 21-17 at Temple0 headlines
Each week as this page showed it at the time. Weeks marked rebuilt came before this page existed: they were built afterward from only what was known by the end of that week.
Watch the biggest plays from Army’s games, ranked by how much each moved the chance to win.
Report card
Offense carries it: 76th percentile offense, below the median defense at 46th.
Army, every completed season graded against the whole field, then averaged.
Offense
Defense
Each season is his team’s percentile among every team with that stat (the share it beat), averaged over his completed seasons here; a mid-season takeover year and the season in progress aren’t graded. Letters: A+ 90th percentile and up, A 80, B+ 70, B 60, B− 50, C+ 45, C 40, C− 30, D 15, F below.
Poach watch
This winter
Our poach model, on his record so far, the win chances for every game he has left, his program, his pay and his background. Ranked against the 132 FBS head coaches this season. The zone words describe the market’s interest; none of them says he is leaving.
What drives his number
The biggest factors in his profile, each against the typical FBS head coach today. The games he has left are priced into the number, not listed here.
- ▲ HigherHis team is 5-3, outscoring opponents by 8.1 points a game
- ▼ LowerAge 59 · neither at his alma mater nor in the state he was born in
- ▲ HigherHis 13th season at Army
How good is this number? It ranks a head coach who leaves for another head-coaching job ahead of one who stays 78 to 82% of the time, and its average came within a point of the share who actually left. What it can’t do
Tested on every FBS head coach from 2012 through 2025, each season scored by a model fit only on the seasons before it. From three games on, given one coach who left for a head-coaching job elsewhere or an NFL coordinator job and one who stayed, it ranked the one who left ahead 79 to 82% of the time; in a season’s first two games, 78%. Its average chance came within a point of the share who actually left. It counts a move a coach makes while he still holds the job; when his school ends it, that doesn’t count, even if another school then hires him.
- The live number prices the games he has left with the power model’s ratings from this season. The test priced them with each team’s rating from the season before, because ratings made during past seasons were not kept, so this live version could not be replayed.
- Programs new to FBS have no FBS record before this season in the data it reads, so their coaches are scored without one.
- It is frozen: it learns nothing from 2026 until a deliberate refit.
- A coach hired in December needs his background (age, alma mater, the state he was born in) added before his first game, or he shows as not rated.
Fans
Fan chatter
- Oct 23W 38-35 at Tulsa
Go for the win, Monken.
Army fan - Sep 25W 21-17 at Temple
Monken hasn’t been able to close a game out in two seasons
Army fan - Sep 12L 24-28 vs. South Florida
Seems to be those typical days which Monken does some mid decisions and game ends into a 28-14 loss
Army fan
Earlier weeks
- Sep 5W 59-3 vs. Bryant
Monken has earned the ability to survive a rough season. He's in the hot seat if it happens again, though.
Army fan

A few stories about him in the last 30 days
Sat Nov 7: Air Force
from a few outlets
Army football coach Jeff Monken - Get used to close games
The Poughkeepsie Journal +2 Oct 12 · a few outlets
All 3 articles
Many stories about him this season
from many outlets
Army football coach Jeff Monken agrees to new five-year contract - Times Herald-Record
Spectrum News +3 Aug 13 · a few outlets
All 5 articles
What they’re talking about
The headlines for each topic are on the News tab.
Is he on the hot seat? Could another school hire him? What has he said?
Across his career
20 stories about him across 13 seasons
Stories are headlines grouped by what they are about, counted through Nov 4.
Stats
Big games
The big-game ledger
How he does in the games that matter most — rivalry record, performance broken out by real opponent tier, one-score games, and his toughest historical matchup.
13-11 against his rivals. Just 1-4 against Dave Clawson.
ATS is his record against the spread: did his team beat the closing betting line, winning by more than it or losing by less? Lines start in 2013; a dash means fewer than 6 of those games had one. One-score games carry no spread record: a big favorite that wins a close game has almost always failed to cover, so that number would say nothing about the coach.
Signature games






Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
How he plays
Run/pass mix, by field position
Ran more than the situation called for under Davis, Thatcher and Worley.
9,691 run and pass snaps at Army, 2014–2025, his own games, one row per offensive coordinator. Each cell is how much more often he passed than the rest of FBS did in the same situation (field zone, down, distance, score, quarter, same season), in percentage points.
Pass rate, stint by stint
Where each stint’s offense sat between run-first and pass-first, and how far it moved from one season to the next, against the FBS-wide average of 41% pass. The band is that stint’s real season-to-season range, not a fixed-width box.
Season-to-season pass-rate range for all 449 FBS coaching stints with at least three covered seasons, 2004–2025.
Building the roster
Four numbers on how he actually stocks a roster, from signing day to draft day.
His recruiting, really
His 9 ranked Army classes of his own have averaged #121 nationally — best #99, worst #138.
His class — he had the full signing cycle
Rank is each signing class’s national recruiting rank (#1 is best). Only a class he had a full signing cycle to build counts as his.
Roster ownership
Roster ownership
of his 2026 roster arrived on his watch — 196 of 196 players. Nobody is left from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 0% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
This tenure spans the 2021 transfer-portal tracking floor: seasons before 2021 structurally cannot be classified portal-vs-not (they land in 'unknown' below), so the portal-share figure understates how many pre-2021 arrivals might have been transfers under the pre-portal-tracking transfer rules.
He has added no portal transfers on record since 2022: all 388 of his new players arrived some other way, while FBS programs drew 23% of theirs from the portal over the same seasons.
Graded on the players who arrived and the players who left together, his portal seasons came out worse than most FBS programs’ in 2 of the 3 seasons graded. our read
Each player counts once, in the season he arrived. 2021, the first season of portal tracking here, is left off because its arrival records look incomplete (about 31 new players per FBS team, against 52 in 2022). Portal grade: the site’s position-value-weighted scoring (the same engine as the Portal Heat feed and the “Who won the portal” grade): the value of the players who came in minus the value of the ones who left, ranked against every FBS program’s grade that same season. A season with fewer than 4 transfers in and out is not graded.
“His own” means the player arrived while he was head coach; “inherited” means a predecessor brought him in.
Size up front
Size up front
Offensive linemen on his Army rosters have averaged 18 lb lighter than the FBS average (2014–2026) — lighter than 98% of FBS coaching runs since 2010. In the three seasons before he arrived, Army’s line averaged 43 lb lighter than the FBS average.
Average listed weight of every offensive lineman on each season’s roster, holdovers included, against every FBS roster that season (2010 on; a program needs 3+ seasons under him to appear). Weights are the ones programs publish, and programs list differently. This describes size only — not scheme, and not quality.
Where he recruits
is his biggest recruiting state: 104 of 555 signees (19%) across his 2014–2026 tenure, drawn from 41 states in all. Next: GA (54).
23% of his signees come from TX and its 4 border states (LA 14, AR 7, OK 5).
Off this map: 37 signees to the west (CA 34, WA 2, others).
- median hometown distance
- 762 mi
- within 100 mi
- 5%
- within 500 mi
- 22%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 39%
The map counts signed recruits across his tenure; the distance figures cover his current roster, transfers and walk-ons included. Two different groups, kept separate on purpose.
News
In his own words
Every quote, back to September 2026
In his own words
We really just focused our efforts and our concentration on Temple, who’s got an outstanding team
I admire that. I respect that greatly
They are very multiple
We’ve got to improve at destroying blocks on defense and getting ball carriers to the ground
When that gets shown on video and you see the result, that probably sends a stronger message than me just yelling at them or getting mad at them
I don’t know if it’s an opportunity
He knows our signals, our calls, our terminology
They’ve got a great quarterback, and their kicker might be one of the best kickers, maybe the best kicker in the country
We’re fanatical about fundamentals
Career
Coaching career
The arc of his career is on Now.
Builder meaningfully raised a program that wasn't one
7th-best Army tenure of 17 by the numbers.
Followed Rich Ellerson (2009–2013).
| Season | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | ||||||||||||||
| Record | 4-8 | 2-10 | 8-5 | 10-3 | 11-2 | 5-8 | 9-3 | 9-4 | 6-6 | 6-6 | 12-2 | 7-6 | 5-3 | |
| Postseason | — | — | W bowl | W bowl | W bowl | — | L bowl | W bowl | — | — | W bowl | W bowl | — | |
| Coordinators | ||||||||||||||
| OC | Brent Davis | Brent Davis | Brent Davis | Brent Davis | Brent Davis | Brent Davis | Brent Davis | Brent Davis | Brent Davis | Drew Thatcher | Cody Worley | Cody Worley | Cody Worley | |
| DC | Jay Bateman | Jay Bateman | Jay Bateman | Jay Bateman | Jay Bateman | John Loose | Greg Gasparato / Nate Woody | Nate Woody / Shiel Wood | Nate Woody | Nate Woody | Nate Woody | Nate Woody | Daryl Dixon | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | ||||||||||||||
| Offense | 54 | 30 | 79 | 93 | 96 | 71 | 41 | 57 | 63 | 17 | 88 | 73 | 95 | |
| Defense | 17 | 31 | 71 | 20 | 63 | 33 | 90 | 30 | 68 | 18 | 47 | 50 | 8 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | ||||||||||||||
| 1st-down pass% | 10.5 | 12.1 | 9.7 | 5.0 | 6.8 | 11.9 | 7.4 | 13.7 | 12.6 | 17.1 | 10.8 | 9.5 | 17.3 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 8.0 | 16.9 | 6.5 | 3.1 | 5.3 | 9.2 | 4.2 | 2.9 | 6.7 | 10.0 | 8.1 | 12.7 | 9.7 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 38.9 | 46.4 | 55.9 | 62.5 | 57.1 | 59.4 | 65.8 | 55.3 | 53.3 | 41.7 | 66.7 | 65.3 | 47.8 | |
Outperforms his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
Coach of the Year: AAC Coach of the Year (2024)
All-time wins
Wins at programs this site tracks, 1936–present — one consistent count for every coach, not each program’s own historically reported total.
2nd all-time at Army
Was he good?
The data leans positive: every conclusive reading points the same way.
+17.0 pts at Army · #94 of 1290 · top quarterModel fit as of 2026-09-04.








