🔗 Share this article

Typically, the National Football League's Coach of the Year trophy adheres to a straightforward formula. It frequently serves as a type of mea culpa. Our apologies we got wrong your team in our preseason projections.

Theoretically, it's a direct trajectory: the coach who engineered the most dramatic resurgence wins the award. In practice, it sparks an yearly argument about expectations and whether we're genuinely rewarding superior leadership or merely the most shocking surprise.

However this year's field is distinctly unique. The pool of contenders is unusually talented. It has been the campaign of turnarounds. The NFL has been chaotic, with recent conference winners declining and longtime also-rans ascending in unison. In an typical season, a coach guiding the his team to the top of the AFC would make him the clear favorite. Yet in this turbulent and entertaining year, he's facing five other exceptional candidates.

This is how the hypothetical ballot should shake out.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, 11-5

Voters for Coach of the Year selectors are fascinated by quarterbacks. They always have. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. If you solve a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson not only fixed Caleb Williams; he's unleashed him. Within an ideal ecosystem, Williams has been given the chance to demonstrate his rare talent. Since Week 9, the Chicago offense rank number four in offensive EPA per play. That's not a lucky run – it's sustained excellence. With his guidance, Williams has become more decisive, far less reckless, and has eagerly submitted to the system instead of going rogue. It is an offense designed solely in the coach's vision: a physical ground attack, a consistent dose of play-action and a creative aerial game that springs wide receiver targets consistently. Williams has capitalized. And when easy reads weren't available, he's been able to conjure magic from nothing.

The coach came to the Bears with a defined offensive philosophy. Almost every gamble – rebuilding the offensive line, featuring the pass-catchers, turning Williams into a timing-based thrower – has paid off. This is rare for a first-year head coach. And it's even more uncommon yet for a coach who walked into the organization with the kind of expectations he did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the hottest name on the head coaching carousel. But when it comes to hiring a leader, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, he has lived up to expectations – and even exceeded them. He's proven not just to be a scheme wizard but the type of culture builder that can inject new life into an organization.

During a normal year, Johnson would be the runaway choice. Yet the current is not a typical season!

Where his case runs slightly into trouble is on defense. The Bears presently rank 25th in defensive success rate. They are surviving on turnovers, and takeaways are notoriously fickle. Defensive minds can emphasise ball disruption, but no one can ensure it. He is on the list because the offense is legitimate. He's not higher because variance is doing an outsized share of the defensive work. With a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be several wins worse off. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is in place for long-term success. However Johnson comes up short here.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar spot to his counterpart. He's another first-time leader who has masterminded a dramatic resurgence. During the stretch run of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best all-around ball of his career. And he's also overseen the overhaul of a defense that now ranks number five in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

Even more notably, Coen has nailed the intangibles aspects, which was not a given after his early public appearances and some of his preseason moves.

The coach took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally raw coaching staff. In contrast to Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the ideal staff blend of new ideas and experience, he bet on first-timers. From the leader himself to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jags are filled with first-timers. That kind of setup is intriguing on paper, but frequently collapses in reality – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a new job in real-time. But Coen has managed to bring the entire group and all elements together.

After an initial strong start, there was a chance that the season would go off the rails. A midseason collapse caused the team stumbling once more. That's usually when coaches overcorrect. He didn't. Rather, he streamlined things. Jacksonville stopped pursuing explosive answers and started hunting consistent ones. The coach recentered the offense around key players and the ground attack, and encouraged his QB to use his legs more.

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

3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, His Team, 13-3

Each Strong of the Year argument has a defining decision. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback move.

Parting ways from a veteran, bringing in a different signal-caller and partnering him with an new play-caller could have ended the campaign in the early weeks. Rather, it made it. By the mid point of the season, the acquisition was an MVP front-runner. He has regressed after that time, dropping to a lower rank in EPA per dropback over the latter part of the schedule, putting him just one place ahead of other QBs.

Still