The Opening Drive 7/19: Todd Moken's Schemes to Know -- Trap

The misdirection scheme has been explosive in Monken's career and the Browns will try to replicate it.

Jul 19, 2026

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BEREA, OHIO - JUNE 10: Head coach Todd Monken of the Cleveland Browns looks on during the Cleveland Browns Mandatory Minicamp at CrossCountry Mortgage Campus on June 10, 2026 in Berea, Ohio. (Photo by Nick Cammett/Getty Images)

Everyone wants to talk about Todd Monken’s run game in terms of zone-read tags and RPO menus, because that’s the vocabulary that sounds like modern offense. But the play that did the most quiet damage to Baltimore’s rushing numbers over the last three years wasn’t some exotic wrinkle. It was trap — a concept that predates the shotgun, the spread, and most of the coaches currently running either. Here’s a quick coaching points recap on the reasoning behind the scheme.

All of that above is fancy, but the mechanics haven’t changed since dirt fields and leather helmets. You let a defensive lineman rush upfield unblocked, sell him on a clean run to the backfield, and then hit him from the side with a pulling guard while the rest of the line down-blocks away from the play’s actual point of attack. The whole concept is built on lying to a defender for half a second. Against modern fronts stuffed with penetrating, gap-shooting three-techniques who are coached to get vertical and disrupt, that lie works better than it has in years.

The more aggressively a defensive tackle attacks the backfield, the further he runs himself out of the play trap is designed to hit.

Monken doesn’t run a trap-only system — he never has. His scheme, going back to Georgia, is a genuine hybrid: inside zone as the foundational concept, duo mixed in as a gap-scheme cousin that plays like zone but blocks like power, and trap sprinkled in as a change-up specifically to punish defenses that had started keying too hard on zone-blocking angles. Monken mixes inside and outside zone runs with gap schemes to create running lanes and control tempo. The result in Baltimore wasn’t subtle. In 2024, the Ravens led the NFL in rushing yards at 3,189, doing it at 5.8 yards per carry, with Derrick Henry posting a career-best 5.9 yards per carry and the second-most rushing yards in the league at 1,921. That same season Baltimore led the league in yards per game at 424.9 and became the first team in NFL history to both throw for 4,000 yards and rush for 3,000 in the same season.

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