🔗 Share this article

Typically, the National Football League's Coach of the Year award follows a straightforward pattern. It often serves as a kind of mea culpa. Our apologies we misjudged your franchise in our pre-campaign forecasts.

Theoretically, it's a direct path: the skipper who engineered the largest resurgence receives the prize. In practice, it fuels an annual discussion about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly honoring superior leadership or just the biggest shock.

But the latest race is profoundly unique. The list of nominees is remarkably deep. It has been the year of turnarounds. The league has been chaotic, with reigning division champions fading and longtime strugglers improving in unison. In an ordinary season, a coach leading the his team to the top of the conference would make him the stone-cold favorite. Yet in such a wild and fun season, he's up against multiple other elite candidates.

Below is how the hypothetical vote ought to shake out.

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

Coach of the Year voters love signal-callers. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. Should you transform a franchise QB, you're well on your way home.

Ben Johnson didn't merely corrected Caleb Williams; he's unleashed him. In the right environment, the QB has been afforded the chance to display his special ability. From midseason onward, the Bears sit at fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's consistent performance. Under his guidance, Williams has become more confident, far less careless, and has eagerly surrendered to the system instead of improvising. It is an offense built solely in Johnson's vision: a physical ground attack, a heavy dose of play-action passes and a creative passing attack that creates wide receiver targets all over the field. The QB has capitalized. And when openings weren't there, he's been capable to conjure magic from broken plays.

Johnson arrived to the Bears with a specific offensive blueprint. Virtually every gamble – overhauling the offensive line, utilizing the tight ends, transforming the QB into a timing-based thrower – has succeeded. This is rare for a rookie head coach. And it's even more uncommon yet for a leader who walked into the organization with the kind of expectations Johnson did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the hottest candidate on the head coaching market. However when it comes to hiring a leader, there are no guarantees. Remarkably, he has lived up to expectations – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not only to be a offensive wizard but the type of culture builder that can inject fresh energy into an organization.

During a normal season, he would be the overwhelming choice. Yet this is not a typical campaign!

The area where his candidacy runs a bit into trouble is on defense. The Chicago defense presently sit 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on takeaways, and turnovers are famously unreliable. Defensive minds can emphasise creating turnovers, but no one can ensure it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offensive production is sustainable. He's ranked lower because luck is doing too much of the defense's heavy lifting. If not for a few breaks of the ball, the Bears would be two victories worse off. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the foundation is in place for long-term success. But Johnson comes up just short here.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4

Coen is in a comparable position to Johnson. He's another first-time leader who has engineered a rapid turnaround. During the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the most complete all-around football of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the remaking of a defense that now sits at fifth in the league in EPA per play.

Even more impressively, he has nailed the leadership aspects, which wasn't a certainty after his initial press conference introduction and some of his offseason decisions.

Coen took over the Jaguars with an exceptionally inexperienced coaching staff. In contrast to Johnson, who packed themselves with the ideal staff mix of youth and experience, he bet on first-timers. Starting with the leader himself to assistants to position coaches, the Jags are filled with first-timers. That kind of setup is exciting in theory, but often collapses in reality – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a their job on the fly. But Coen has pulled everyone and everything into sync.

Following an early strong start, there was a chance that the season would go off the track. A mid-year collapse caused the team wobbling once more. That's usually when coaches overcorrect. Coen didn't. Instead, he streamlined the approach. The offense stopped chasing home-run plays and started seeking consistent ones. The coach recentered the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and asked his QB to use his legs more.

The results are clear. The Jaguars have won seven games in a row and will be the conference's No 3 playoff seed. Coen gets the tiniest deduction in the rankings because he took over a talented roster, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that roster.

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

Every Strong of the Year narrative has a pivotal moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB decision.

Moving on from a veteran, bringing in a new quarterback and pairing him with an new offensive coordinator could have ended the campaign in the early weeks. Instead, it shaped it. Through the middle point of the season, the new QB was an MVP candidate. He has fallen away since that hot streak, slipping to 23rd in EPA per pass attempt over the second half of the schedule, placing him only a single spot ahead of other QBs.

Still