🔗 Share this article

Ordinarily, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor follows a simple pattern. It commonly serves as a type of mea culpa. We regret we got wrong your squad in our preseason projections.

On paper, it's a direct path: the coach who engineered the largest improvement receives the award. In practice, it sparks an yearly argument about expectations and whether we're actually rewarding superior coaching or simply the greatest upset.

However the current race is distinctly different. The group of nominees is unusually deep. It has been the season of turnarounds. The NFL has been unpredictable, with reigning conference winners declining and longtime underperformers rising collectively. During an ordinary year, Sean Payton guiding the Denver Broncos to the summit of the conference would make him the overwhelming front-runner. Yet in such a turbulent and entertaining year, he's up against multiple other exceptional coaches.

Below is how the ideal vote ought to be structured.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, His Team, 11-5

Coach of the Year voters love quarterbacks. History shows this. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. If you transform a franchise QB, you're well on your way home.

Ben Johnson didn't merely corrected his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. In the right ecosystem, the QB has been afforded the chance to showcase his otherworldly ability. From Week 9, the Bears rank fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a hot streak – it's consistent excellence. With his guidance, Williams has become more decisive, far less reckless, and has willingly surrendered to the system rather than going rogue. It is an offense designed solely in Johnson's vision: a bully-ball run game, a steady dose of play-action and a imaginative aerial game that springs wide receiver receivers consistently. The QB has taken advantage. And when openings weren't there, he's been able to create big plays from nothing.

Johnson arrived to Chicago with a clear offensive vision. Almost each bet – rebuilding the trenches, featuring the tight ends, turning the QB into a timing-based thrower – has worked. That's rare for a first-year head coach. And it's rarer still for a leader who walked into the organization with the kind of hype he did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the most sought-after name on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, he has met expectations – and even exceeded them. He's proven not only to be a scheme genius but the kind of culture builder that can inject new life into an organization.

In a ordinary season, he would be the overwhelming choice. But this is not a typical year!

The area where Johnson's candidacy runs a bit into trouble is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense presently sit 25th in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on turnovers, and takeaways are notoriously unreliable. Coaches can stress creating turnovers, but no one can guarantee it. He is on the ballot because the offensive production is legitimate. He's not higher because luck is doing too much of the defensive heavy lifting. If not for a couple bounces of the ball, the team would be two victories worse off. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the foundation is in place for long-term winning. However Johnson falls just short here.

4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar position to Johnson. He's a fellow rookie head coach who has orchestrated a dramatic turnaround. During the crucial final weeks of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest overall football of his professional life. And he's also overseen the remaking of a defense that now sits at fifth in the NFL in EPA per play.

What's more impressively, he has excelled at the intangibles stuff, which was not a given after his initial press conference introduction and some of his preseason moves.

The coach took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally inexperienced coaching staff. In contrast to other coaches, who packed their staff with the perfect coaching cocktail of new ideas and experience, he bet on first-timers. From the leader himself to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with first-timers. That type of approach is exciting on paper, but often fails in practice – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a new job on the fly. But Coen has pulled the entire group and everything together.

After an early hot beginning, there was a risk that the season would veer off the track. A mid-year setback caused the Jags stumbling again. That's typically when leaders overcorrect. He didn't. Instead, he simplified things. The offense stopped pursuing explosive answers and started hunting sustainable ones. The coach refocused the offense around key players and the ground attack, and encouraged his QB to use his mobility more often.

The results are obvious. The Jags have won seven games in a row and will be the conference's number three playoff seed. Coen receives the slightest knock in the rankings because he took over a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that talent.

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

Every Coach of the Year case has a hinge decision. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback decision.

Parting ways from a incumbent, signing a different signal-caller and pairing him with an new play-caller might have ended the season in the early weeks. Rather, it defined it. Through the mid point of the year, the acquisition was an MVP front-runner. He has fallen away after that time, slipping to a lower rank in efficiency per pass attempt over the second half of the season, placing him only a single place ahead of peers.

Still