🔗 Share this article

Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year trophy follows a simple formula. It often acts as a type of mea culpa. Our apologies we underestimated your squad in our preseason projections.

Theoretically, it's a direct trajectory: the skipper who oversaw the largest turnaround is handed the prize. However, it creates an yearly argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're actually honoring superior leadership or simply the greatest upset.

Yet the latest competition is distinctly unique. The pool of contenders is unusually strong. It has been the season of comebacks. The league has been unpredictable, with reigning conference champions declining and longtime also-rans ascending together. Under an normal year, Sean Payton guiding the his team to the top of the AFC would make him the clear favorite. But in such a wild and fun season, he's up against several other exceptional coaches.

Below is how the ideal vote ought to look.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, His Team, Their Record

Voters for Coach of the Year voters love signal-callers. They always have. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. If you fix a quarterback, you're well on your way to winning the award.

Ben Johnson hasn't just fixed Caleb Williams; he's unleashed him. In the right ecosystem, the QB has been afforded the opportunity to showcase his special ability. From midseason onward, the Chicago offense sit at number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a hot streak – it's prolonged dominance. With his guidance, the quarterback has become more decisive, less careless, and has eagerly surrendered to the gameplan instead of freelancing. It is an offense constructed entirely in the coach's vision: a bully-ball ground attack, a heavy dose of play-action and a innovative passing attack that frees wide-open receivers all over the field. The QB has thrived. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been able to conjure magic out of nothing.

The coach came to the Bears with a defined offensive blueprint. Almost every bet – overhauling the offensive line, highlighting the tight ends, turning the QB into a rhythm passer – has succeeded. That's rare for a rookie head coach. And it's even more uncommon still for a coach who walked into the building with the immense expectations he did. For two straight offseasons, he was the top name on the coaching market. However when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are no sure things. Remarkably, he has met the hype – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not only to be a offensive dork but the type of culture builder that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.

In a typical year, Johnson would be the runaway favorite. But the current is not a typical season!

Where Johnson's candidacy comes slightly into trouble is on defense. The Chicago defense currently sit in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on turnovers, and takeaways are notoriously unreliable. Coaches can focus on creating turnovers, but no one can guarantee it. He is on the ballot because the offense is legitimate. He's not higher because variance is doing an outsized share of the defensive work. If not for a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be two victories behind. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the foundation is in place for sustained winning. But he comes up short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

Coen is in a comparable spot to Johnson. He's another first-time leader who has engineered a rapid turnaround. Over the crucial final weeks of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest overall football of his career. And he's also spearheaded the transformation of a defense that now ranks fifth in the NFL in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more notably, he has mastered the off-field stuff, which was not a certainty after his early public introduction and some of his preseason decisions.

Coen took over Jacksonville with an uncommonly raw coaching staff. In contrast to other coaches, who packed their staff with the ideal staff cocktail of new ideas and experience, Coen trusted newbies. Starting with the head coach himself to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with rookies. That type of setup is exciting on paper, but often collapses in reality – with other teams are a warning – because everyone is learning a their job in real-time. Yet he has pulled everyone and everything into sync.

Following an initial hot beginning, there was a chance that the season would go off the track. A mid-year setback caused the team wobbling again. That's typically when coaches overcorrect. Coen didn't. Rather, he streamlined things. The offense stopped pursuing home-run plays and started seeking reliable ones. Coen refocused the offense around his playmakers and the running game, and encouraged his QB to use his legs more often.

The results are evident. The Jaguars have won seven games consecutively and will be the conference's number three seed. Coen gets the slightest knock in the rankings because he took over a skilled team, but he has proven he can get the most out of that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record

Every Strong of the Year narrative has a pivotal decision. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB move.

Parting ways from a veteran, signing a new quarterback and pairing him with an new offensive coordinator might have ended the season in the early weeks. Rather, it defined it. Through the mid point of the year, the new QB was an MVP front-runner. He has cooled off after that hot streak, slipping to a lower rank in EPA per pass attempt over the second half of the schedule, putting him just a single place ahead of peers.

Still