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Ordinarily, the NFL's Coach of the Year award follows a straightforward pattern. It commonly functions as a type of mea culpa. Our apologies we got wrong your franchise in our preseason forecasts.

Theoretically, it's a direct line: the skipper who orchestrated the most dramatic resurgence is handed the award. In practice, it creates an yearly argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely rewarding superior leadership or merely the greatest upset.

However this year's race is fundamentally different. The list of contenders is remarkably strong. It has been the season of turnarounds. The league has been unpredictable, with reigning conference champions falling away and longtime also-rans ascending together. In an typical year, a coach leading the his team to the top of the AFC would make him the overwhelming favorite. But in such a chaotic and entertaining year, he's up against several other elite candidates.

Here is how the ideal ballot could look.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, 11-5

Coach of the Year voters adore QBs. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. If you solve a franchise QB, you're well on your way to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach hasn't just corrected Caleb Williams; he's unlocked him. In the right environment, the QB has been afforded the opportunity to demonstrate his rare talent. From midseason onward, the Bears sit at number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a brief surge – it's sustained performance. With his guidance, Williams has become more decisive, far less careless, and has willingly submitted to the system instead of improvising. It is an offense designed entirely in the coach's vision: a bully-ball run game, a heavy helping of play-action passes and a imaginative aerial game that frees wide receiver receivers all over the field. The QB has taken advantage. And when easy reads haven't been available, he's been capable to conjure magic from broken plays.

The coach arrived to the Bears with a specific offensive blueprint. Almost each bet – rebuilding the offensive line, highlighting the pass-catchers, turning Williams into a timing-based thrower – has succeeded. That's uncommon for a rookie skipper. And it's rarer still for a coach who walked into the organization with the level of expectations he did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the hottest candidate on the coaching market. However when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are zero guarantees. Somehow, he has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not just to be a scheme dork but the kind of leader that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.

During a ordinary year, Johnson would be the overwhelming choice. Yet this isn't a typical year!

Where Johnson's candidacy runs slightly into trouble is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense presently sit in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are living on takeaways, and takeaways are notoriously fickle. Defensive minds can emphasise creating turnovers, but nobody can ensure it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offensive production is legitimate. He's not higher because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. With a couple breaks of the ball, the Bears would be two victories worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is in place for sustained winning. However Johnson comes up short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable position to his counterpart. He's another first-time head coach who has masterminded a dramatic resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest all-around football of his career. And he's also overseen the overhaul of a defensive unit that now sits at fifth in the league in EPA per play.

Even more impressively, he has mastered the intangibles aspects, which wasn't a certainty following his early public introduction and some of his preseason decisions.

The coach walked into Jacksonville with an uncommonly inexperienced staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded their staff with the ideal coaching cocktail of new ideas and experience, Coen bet on first-timers. Starting with the leader himself to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with rookies. That kind of setup is intriguing on paper, but often fails in reality – with other teams are a warning – because everyone is figuring out a their job on the fly. Yet Coen has pulled the entire group and all elements into sync.

After an early strong start, there was a possibility that the season would veer off the rails. A midseason setback had the Jags wobbling again. That's typically when leaders overcorrect. He did not. Instead, he streamlined things. The offense stopped pursuing home-run answers and started seeking consistent ones. The coach refocused the attack around his playmakers and the running game, and asked Lawrence to use his mobility more often.

The results are obvious. The Jaguars have won seven games in a row and will be the AFC's No 3 seed. Coen gets the slightest knock in the rankings because he took over a talented roster, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that talent.

3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, His Team, Their Record

Each Strong of the Year narrative has a hinge moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his quarterback choice.

Moving on from a incumbent, signing a new signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative play-caller could have derailed the season in October. Instead, it defined it. Through the mid point of the season, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has cooled off after that time, dropping to 23rd in EPA per dropback over the second half of the schedule, putting him just a single place ahead of other QBs.

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