🔗 Share this article

Usually, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year honor adheres to a straightforward formula. It commonly serves as a kind of apology. Our apologies we got wrong your squad in our preseason projections.

On paper, it's a direct path: the coach who oversaw the largest improvement wins the prize. In practice, it creates an annual debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're actually rewarding superior coaching or just the biggest upset.

But the latest competition is profoundly unique. The group of candidates is exceptionally deep. It has been the year of comebacks. The league has been unpredictable, with reigning division winners falling away and longtime strugglers ascending in unison. In an typical season, Sean Payton guiding the Denver Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the stone-cold favorite. But in such a chaotic and thrilling year, he's competing with five other exceptional candidates.

Below is how the ideal ballot ought to look.

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

Coach of the Year voters adore signal-callers. History shows this. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. Should you solve a franchise QB, you're halfway home.

Ben Johnson hasn't just fixed Caleb Williams; he's freed him. Within an ideal system, Williams has been afforded the chance to showcase his otherworldly talent. Since Week 9, the Bears sit at fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a brief surge – it's consistent excellence. With his guidance, the quarterback has become increasingly confident, far less careless, and has willingly submitted to the scheme rather than improvising. It is an attack built solely in the coach's image: a bully-ball ground attack, a heavy dose of play-action passes and a imaginative aerial game that creates wide receiver receivers everywhere. The QB has taken advantage. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been able to conjure magic from broken plays.

The coach came to Chicago with a clear offensive vision. Almost every decision – overhauling the offensive line, featuring the pass-catchers, turning Williams into a timing-based passer – has succeeded. That's rare for a first-year head coach. And it's even more uncommon still for a leader who entered the building with the kind of pressure he did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the most sought-after candidate on the coaching market. However when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, he has met the hype – and even exceeded them. He's proven not just to be a scheme dork but the type of leader that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.

In a normal season, he would be the runaway favorite. Yet this is not a typical season!

The area where Johnson's case comes a bit unstuck is on the defensive side. The Bears currently rank in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on takeaways, and turnovers are famously unreliable. Defensive minds can focus on creating turnovers, but no one can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is sustainable. He's not higher because variance is doing too much of the defense's heavy lifting. With a few bounces of the ball, the team would be several wins behind. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the foundation is in place for long-term winning. But he falls short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, Their Record

Coen is in a similar position to his counterpart. He's a fellow first-time leader who has engineered a rapid resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest overall football of his career. And he's also overseen the transformation of a defense that now sits at fifth in the league in EPA per play.

What's more notably, Coen has mastered the off-field aspects, which wasn't a given after his early press conference appearances and some of his offseason moves.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an exceptionally inexperienced staff. Unlike Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the perfect coaching cocktail of youth and experience, Coen hired first-timers. Starting with the head coach himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with rookies. That type of setup is intriguing on paper, but frequently fails in practice – as past failures are a warning – because everyone is figuring out a new job on the fly. Yet Coen has pulled the entire group and everything together.

Following an early hot start, there was a chance that the season would veer off the rails. A midseason setback caused the Jags stumbling once more. That's usually when leaders overcorrect. Coen didn't. Instead, he simplified things. The offense stopped pursuing home-run answers and started hunting consistent ones. The coach refocused the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and encouraged his QB to use his mobility more.

The results are obvious. The Jaguars have won multiple games consecutively and will be the AFC's No 3 seed. Coen receives the slightest knock in the standings because he took over a talented roster, but he has proven he can get the most out of that roster.

3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, His Team, Their Record

Every Coach of the Year narrative has a pivotal decision. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB decision.

Moving on from a veteran, signing a different signal-caller and pairing him with an new play-caller might have ended the campaign in the early weeks. Rather, it shaped it. By the middle point of the season, the new QB was an MVP candidate. He has regressed since that time, slipping to a lower rank in EPA per pass attempt over the latter part of the schedule, placing him only a single spot ahead of peers.

Still