Mike McCarthy and Todd Monken sit at nearby round tables in the MacArthur Ballroom at the Biltmore in Arizona during the NFL’s annual meeting in Arizona. The room is named for Albert Chase MacArthur, who designed the resort over a century ago. The setup offered its own irony: Both men missed the hotel infrastructure, but by NFL recruiting standards, they were close.
McCarthy is 62 and beginning his third tour as an NFL head coach, this time with Pittsburgh. Monken was hired by Cleveland days before his 60th birthday and is getting his first chance. One is a known quantity. Another has been getting interviews for decades but doesn’t know the office.
Had there not been another call, McCarthy would have been perfectly content to stay home and be a father. The year away from football cost his family and fueled his NFL engine. The only question was whether the game still needed it.
Monken asked himself the same question three years ago. He loved calling plays at Georgia, where he helped win two national championships. Money was not the lure; Monken was better paid at Georgia than many NFL coordinators. But he still wanted to know if he could be an NFL head coach. At the age of 57, he called the coaches he trusted and asked if they enjoyed the job. Their response prompted him to leave Athens for Baltimore and make a bet on himself just when the league seemed to be considering him the coordinator of a lifetime.
It didn’t take Monken long to figure out how well the top earpiece fit. Deshaun Watson was named the Browns’ starter before the first game of the season, drawing the ire of fans who booed Watson in the preseason and inviting another round of criticism by claiming he hadn’t watched Watson’s previous Browns film.
This is part of the job Monken has pursued for years: not only choosing the quarterback, but owning the decision, the anger surrounding it and all that comes with it.
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The NFL has spent the last decade trying to buy most people tomorrow. NFL owners go into every coaching search with essentially the same question: Find me the next Sean McVay. A better young man. If he stood next to McVeigh in the lunch line once, even better.
Youth became shorthand for creativity. Experience became a polite way of calling someone old.
By the 2025 season, the average age of a head coach has dropped from about 53 or 54 to 47.7. Over the past decade, new hires averaged about 46.5. This year’s class averaged about 47.
The trend has not reversed. What has changed is the willingness to look above average and look at men who are 60 or older. It was the first time in the post-merger era that three coaches were hired in the same cycle and started a season 60 years or older.
Youth became a witness. Age comes with proof – every mistake, game failure and unhappy ending.
That’s what makes this record-setting cycle of 10 recruits so interesting. It wasn’t necessarily old man dominance, but he left room at the table for gray hair and experience. The Giants hired 63-year-old John Harbaugh. Pittsburgh hired McCarthy. Cleveland gave Monken one of the most recent first chances in league history. Four of the 10 hires — Harbaugh, McCarthy, Kevin Stefanski and Robert Saleh — were already NFL head coaches.
The league showed more flexibility around age than diversity. 10 jobs open, none go to black head coach – The fifth straight hiring cycle since the passage of the Rooney Act has resulted in no black head coaching hires – leaving the league with just three.
Steelers coach Mike McCarthy’s file is thick. He won the Super Bowl in Green Bay, which he coached in Dallas, and won 185 games, including the postseason. He was also fired and not retained by Dallas after his contract expired. (Mark Conezny/Imag Images)
The last time it happened was in 2022, when 10 jobs opened up, no one had to cure owners of believing they had solved the hiring process. That episode was a disaster. After four years, eight of the 10 coaches were fired; Only Kevin O’Connell and Todd Bowles remain. The other eight went a combined 125-199-2.
Nathaniel Hackett and Lovie Smith lasted one season or less. Josh McDaniel hit 25 games. Matt Eberflus went 14-32. It was not an archeological failure. The team consisted of freshmen and rebounders, offensive and defensive coaches, juniors and seniors. Certainty was failure. No matter how confidently a franchise sells a new face as its future, the NFL never knows who will succeed.
Stefanski and Saleh aren’t in the same age bracket as McCarthy, Harbaugh and Monken, but their hires are in the same debate. After Cleveland fired him, Atlanta quickly moved on Stefanski, valuing six years of experience and two Coach of the Year awards over an ugly final season. Tennessee gave Saleh another chance a year ago after the Jets’ downfall and as San Francisco’s defensive coordinator. This cycle has also cost scar tissue.
Stefanski arrives in Atlanta and finds – what else? – Another quarterback dilemma. Michael Penix Jr. missed the entire preseason while recovering from a torn ACL, and Tua Tagovailoa has struggled, keeping Stefanski open until September.
McCarthy and Harbaugh got clean starts. McCarthy had inherited Aaron Rodgers, his old Super Bowl quarterback, and Harbaugh, who inherited Jackson Dart as the Giants’ established young starter and spent August worrying about protecting him rather than replacing him. The experience didn’t save Stefanski from another season of quarterback trouble. It made him uniquely qualified to recognize one.
Most coaches and executives I’ve talked to in various sports believe that they get better at their jobs when they’re older. They have seen many situations, made many mistakes and understand which ones are fatal. They often have calmer, more comfortable representation and less leverage by proving that they are the smartest person in the building. Experience does not eliminate bad decisions. The process that generates them should be improved.
McCarthy’s file is thick. He coached in Dallas, won a Super Bowl in Green Bay and won 185 games, including the postseason. He was also fired and not retained by Dallas after his contract expired. Yet Pittsburgh, one of the league’s most tradition-bound franchises, saw value in the entire record. McCarthy became the Steelers’ first head coach since 1965 with former NFL head coaching experience. The Steelers hired each of their previous three coaches in their 30s. This time, they choose a coach who is old enough to know exactly what the job can do for a person and a family.
“I’ve been around the block a few times, and I’m very comfortable in my own skin,” McCarthy said at the Biltmore in March. “This opportunity, when it came, I had to give back. If there was no other idea in my life, this was it.”
Monk’s case requires a different thought. A failed head-coaching stop in the NFL doesn’t require a team to forgive him. A man nearly 60 was still asking his wife to believe he could become a first-time NFL head coach. He became one of the oldest recruits for that first full-time opportunity behind Vic Fangio’s camp and a few outliers like David Cooley and Bruce Arians.
He’s done everything else: college head coach, NFL coordinator, national championship game caller and architect of effective offenses in Tampa Bay and Baltimore. Harbaugh wanted Monken to follow him to New York. Cleveland offered the chair Monken had been chasing. The Browns weren’t recruiting like they normally would. All these years bet they have gained judgement, adaptability and a clearer understanding of what the job is all about.
That bet is hardly guaranteed. Age is not wisdom in itself, and a long career can easily breed stubbornness as an attitude. Many re-enrollments fail because they return as the same coach who was fired the first time. Experience is only important when a coach wants to use it – to change, adapt and acknowledge the unknown.
McCarthy and Monken represent opposite ends of the same argument. McCarthy has been around the block and knows exactly why he’s back. It took years for Monken to believe that all those blocks had prepared him for the throne. One is trying his best to take the third step. Another is finally getting an opening night.
At 60, Monken isn’t trying to prove that a great coach can still succeed. He is trying to show that readiness has no expiration date.
