🔗 Share this article

Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year award adheres to a straightforward pattern. It commonly serves as a type of apology. We regret we got wrong your team in our pre-campaign predictions.

On paper, it's a direct trajectory: the coach who orchestrated the largest improvement wins the award. In reality, it sparks an annual argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely honoring superior leadership or simply the greatest shock.

But the current race is profoundly different. The pool of candidates is remarkably deep. It has been the season of comebacks. The NFL has been chaotic, with recent conference winners falling away and recent also-rans rising collectively. Under an normal year, a coach guiding the his team to the summit of the conference would make him the overwhelming front-runner. Yet in such a chaotic and thrilling season, he's up against multiple other exceptional candidates.

Below is how the projected ballot ought to look.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, 11-5

Voters for Coach of the Year selectors are fascinated by QBs. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. If you solve a franchise QB, you're halfway home.

Ben Johnson hasn't just fixed his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. Given a proper environment, the QB has been given the opportunity to display his otherworldly talent. From Week 9, the Bears rank number four in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a hot streak – it's sustained performance. Under Johnson, the quarterback has become increasingly confident, far less careless, and has eagerly submitted to the scheme rather than freelancing. It is an attack designed entirely in the coach's image: a bully-ball run game, a heavy dose of play-action and a creative aerial game that springs wide-open receivers consistently. The QB has capitalized. And when easy reads weren't available, he's been capable to conjure big plays out of nothing.

Johnson arrived to Chicago with a specific offensive blueprint. Virtually every gamble – rebuilding the offensive line, featuring the tight ends, turning Williams into a rhythm thrower – has succeeded. That's uncommon for a first-year skipper. And it's rarer still for a leader who entered the building with the level of hype Johnson did. For two straight offseasons, he was the top name on the head coaching carousel. But when it comes to hiring a leader, there are zero guarantees. Somehow, he has lived up to expectations – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not just to be a offensive dork but the type of culture builder that can inject new life into an franchise.

In a normal year, he would be the runaway choice. But this is not a normal year!

Where Johnson's candidacy comes slightly unstuck is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense presently sit 25th in defensive efficiency. They are living on turnovers, and turnovers are famously inconsistent. Coaches can focus on ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. He is on the list because the offense is real. He's not higher because variance is doing too much of the defense's work. If not for a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be several victories worse off. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is in place for long-term success. But he falls just short here.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4

Coen is in a comparable spot to Johnson. He's another first-time leader who has masterminded a swift resurgence. During the crucial final weeks of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the most complete all-around football of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the remaking of a defensive unit that now ranks fifth in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more impressively, he has nailed the off-field stuff, which wasn't a given after his initial public appearances and some of his offseason moves.

Coen took over Jacksonville with an uncommonly inexperienced staff. Unlike Johnson, who packed themselves with the ideal staff mix of new ideas and experience, Coen bet on newbies. From the leader himself to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That kind of setup is exciting on paper, but frequently collapses in reality – as past failures are a warning – because everybody is figuring out a their job on the fly. Yet Coen has pulled the entire group and all elements together.

After an initial strong start, there was a risk that the campaign would veer off the rails. A mid-year collapse had the Jags stumbling again. That's usually when leaders overcorrect. Coen did not. Instead, he streamlined things. Jacksonville stopped chasing explosive plays and started hunting consistent ones. Coen recentered the attack around key players and the running game, and asked his QB to use his legs more.

The outcomes are obvious. The Jaguars have won seven games consecutively and will be the AFC's number three seed. He gets the tiniest deduction in the rankings because he inherited a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that talent.

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

Each Strong of the Year case has a defining decision. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB decision.

Parting ways from a veteran, bringing in a different signal-caller and partnering him with an innovative offensive coordinator could have ended the campaign in the early weeks. Rather, it made it. By the middle point of the season, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player front-runner. He has fallen away after that hot streak, slipping to a lower rank in EPA per pass attempt over the latter part of the schedule, placing him only one place ahead of peers.

Still