🔗 Share this article

Usually, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor follows a straightforward script. It often serves as a form of mea culpa. Our apologies we misjudged your team in our pre-campaign projections.

On paper, it's a clear-cut path: the skipper who engineered the biggest turnaround wins the award. However, it creates an annual argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly honoring superior leadership or simply the greatest upset.

Yet the latest field is fundamentally unique. The list of nominees is remarkably talented. It has been the campaign of resurgences. The NFL has been chaotic, with recent division champions fading and longtime also-rans ascending in unison. In an normal season, a coach guiding the Denver Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the overwhelming favorite. Yet in such a turbulent and thrilling season, he's facing several other elite candidates.

Below is how the ideal ballot ought to shake out.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, His Team, Their Record

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. When you transform a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach didn't merely corrected his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. Given a proper environment, the QB has been given the opportunity to demonstrate his special talent. Since Week 9, the Chicago offense rank fourth in offensive EPA per play. That's not a hot streak – it's consistent dominance. With Johnson, the quarterback has become increasingly decisive, far less careless, and has willingly submitted to the gameplan rather than freelancing. It is an offense designed entirely in Johnson's vision: a bully-ball run game, a consistent helping of play-action and a innovative passing attack that springs wide receiver targets everywhere. Williams has taken advantage. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been capable to spin big plays from nothing.

The coach arrived to the Bears with a defined offensive vision. Almost every decision – overhauling the offensive line, utilizing the pass-catchers, transforming the QB into a rhythm thrower – has worked. That's rare for a rookie head coach. And it's even more uncommon yet for a leader who entered the organization with the kind of hype Johnson did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the top candidate on the coaching market. However when it comes to hiring a leader, there are no sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has lived up to the hype – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not only to be a scheme wizard but the kind of leader that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.

During a typical year, Johnson would be the clear-cut choice. But this is not a normal season!

Where Johnson's case runs a bit into trouble is on defense. The Bears presently rank 25th in defensive efficiency. They are living on turnovers, and takeaways are famously fickle. Coaches can stress creating turnovers, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is real. He's ranked lower because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. If not for a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be two victories worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is in place for long-term winning. However he falls short in this ranking.

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

Coen is in a similar spot to his counterpart. He's a fellow first-time head coach who has orchestrated a swift resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best all-around ball of his career. And he's also spearheaded the remaking of a defensive unit that now sits at fifth in the NFL in EPA per play.

What's more impressively, Coen has nailed the off-field aspects, which was not a certainty after his initial press conference introduction and some of his preseason decisions.

The coach walked into the Jaguars with an exceptionally inexperienced coaching staff. In contrast to other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the perfect coaching blend of youth and veteran savvy, Coen hired first-timers. Starting with the leader himself to assistants to position coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with first-timers. That kind of approach is intriguing on paper, but often fails in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everyone is learning a new job in real-time. Yet Coen has pulled everyone and everything into sync.

After an early hot beginning, there was a risk that the season would go off the rails. A mid-year setback had the team stumbling again. That's usually when coaches panic and change too much. He didn't. Rather, he streamlined things. Jacksonville stopped pursuing home-run plays and started hunting reliable ones. The coach refocused the attack around his playmakers and the running game, and encouraged Lawrence to use his mobility more.

The outcomes are evident. The Jags have won multiple games consecutively and will be the conference's number three playoff seed. He gets the tiniest knock in the standings because he took over a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, Their Record

Each Strong of the Year argument has a hinge moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB move.

Parting ways from a veteran, signing a new quarterback and pairing him with an innovative play-caller could have ended the campaign in October. Rather, it defined it. Through the mid point of the season, the new QB was an MVP front-runner. He has fallen away after that time, slipping to 23rd in EPA per pass attempt over the second half of the schedule, putting him only one place ahead of peers.

Still