🔗 Share this article

Typically, the NFL's Coach of the Year award follows a straightforward script. It often serves as a type of mea culpa. Our apologies we misjudged your franchise in our pre-campaign predictions.

On paper, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the coach who orchestrated the most dramatic improvement wins the award. In reality, it sparks an yearly argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely honoring superior leadership or just the most shocking upset.

However the current field is fundamentally unique. The list of nominees is unusually talented. It has been the year of resurgences. The league has been messy, with recent division winners declining and recent strugglers rising in unison. Under an typical season, a coach leading the Denver Broncos to the summit of the conference would make him the stone-cold front-runner. Yet in this wild and thrilling season, he's competing with multiple other exceptional coaches.

This is how the projected vote should shake out.

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

Coach of the Year selectors adore QBs. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. Should you fix a quarterback, you're halfway home.

Ben Johnson not only fixed Caleb Williams; he's unleashed him. In the right environment, the QB has been given the chance to display his special ability. From Week 9, the Chicago offense sit at number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a lucky run – it's sustained performance. With Johnson, Williams has become more decisive, less careless, and has eagerly surrendered to the system rather than freelancing. It is an offense built entirely in Johnson's image: a physical run game, a heavy dose of play-action passes and a innovative passing attack that creates wide-open targets all over the field. The QB has capitalized. And when easy reads weren't available, he's been able to spin big plays from nothing.

Johnson came to Chicago with a defined offensive blueprint. Almost each gamble – overhauling the trenches, utilizing the pass-catchers, turning the QB into a rhythm thrower – has succeeded. This is uncommon for a rookie head coach. And it's rarer still for a coach who entered the organization with the kind of expectations he did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the hottest candidate on the coaching market. But when it comes to selecting a leader, there are no guarantees. Somehow, he has lived up to the hype – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a offensive dork but the kind of leader that can breathe new life into an franchise.

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

The area where Johnson's candidacy comes a bit into trouble is on the defensive side. The Bears currently rank in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on turnovers, and takeaways are notoriously unreliable. Coaches can focus on creating turnovers, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is legitimate. He's not higher because luck is doing an outsized share of the defensive heavy lifting. With a few bounces of the ball, the Bears would be two victories behind. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the foundation is in place for sustained winning. But he falls just short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4

Coen is in a comparable situation to Johnson. He's another first-time head coach who has engineered a swift turnaround. Over the crucial final weeks of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest overall ball of his career. And he's also overseen the transformation of a defensive unit that now ranks number five in the NFL in EPA per play.

What's more notably, he has mastered the off-field stuff, which wasn't a guarantee after his early press conference introduction and some of his offseason moves.

The coach took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally raw staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded their staff with the ideal staff blend of youth and veteran savvy, Coen trusted newbies. Starting with the head coach on down to assistants to position coaches, the Jaguars are filled with first-timers. That kind of approach is intriguing in theory, but often collapses in practice – as past failures are a warning – because everyone is figuring out a their job on the fly. But Coen has managed to bring everyone and all elements into sync.

Following an early strong beginning, there was a risk that the season would go off the track. A mid-year setback had the team wobbling again. That's typically when coaches panic and change too much. Coen didn't. Instead, he simplified the approach. Jacksonville stopped chasing explosive answers and started hunting consistent ones. The coach refocused the attack around key players and the running game, and asked Lawrence to use his legs more often.

The outcomes are evident. The Jags have won multiple games in a row and will be the AFC's number three seed. He gets the tiniest knock in the standings because he took over a skilled roster, but he has proven he can get the most out of that roster.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record

Each Coach of the Year case has a pivotal moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB choice.

Parting ways from a veteran, bringing in a different signal-caller and partnering him with an innovative play-caller might have ended the season in the early weeks. Instead, it made it. By the middle point of the season, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player candidate. He has regressed after that time, slipping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the season, putting him just one spot ahead of peers.

Still