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Usually, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year honor follows a straightforward pattern. It commonly acts as a kind of apology. Our apologies we misjudged your squad in our preseason projections.

On paper, it's a clear-cut line: the coach who orchestrated the biggest improvement receives the award. However, it creates an yearly discussion about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly rewarding superior coaching or simply the most shocking upset.

But the current race is profoundly different. The group of contenders is unusually talented. It has been the season of turnarounds. The league has been chaotic, with recent conference champions fading and longtime underperformers ascending collectively. Under an normal season, Sean Payton guiding the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the stone-cold front-runner. Yet in such a turbulent and thrilling year, he's competing with multiple other exceptional candidates.

This is how the ideal ballot ought to look.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, Their Record

Voters for Coach of the Year selectors are fascinated by quarterbacks. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. If you transform a quarterback, you're well on your way to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach didn't merely fixed Caleb Williams; he's unleashed him. In the right ecosystem, the QB has been given the chance to display his special ability. From Week 9, the Chicago offense sit at fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's prolonged dominance. With his guidance, the quarterback has become increasingly decisive, less reckless, and has eagerly submitted to the system instead of freelancing. It is an attack designed solely in Johnson's image: a bully-ball run game, a steady helping of play-action and a imaginative aerial game that frees wide-open targets consistently. Williams has taken advantage. And when easy reads haven't been available, he's been able to spin magic from nothing.

Johnson came to Chicago with a clear offensive philosophy. Almost every bet – overhauling the trenches, utilizing the tight ends, turning the QB into a rhythm thrower – has succeeded. That's rare for a first-year head coach. And it's even more uncommon yet for a leader who walked into the building with the immense expectations Johnson did. For two straight offseasons, he was the top candidate on the coaching market. But when it comes to hiring a leader, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has lived up to the hype – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not just to be a scheme dork but the type of culture builder that can breathe new life into an franchise.

During a normal season, Johnson would be the runaway favorite. But the current isn't a typical year!

The area where his case runs slightly unstuck is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense currently rank in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are relying on turnovers, and takeaways are notoriously fickle. Defensive minds can focus on creating turnovers, but nobody can ensure it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offensive production is sustainable. He's not higher because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. With a few breaks of the ball, the team would be several wins behind. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the foundation is in place for long-term winning. But he comes up short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable spot to Johnson. He's a fellow rookie head coach who has masterminded a swift turnaround. Over the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best overall ball of his career. And he's also spearheaded the transformation of a defensive unit that now ranks fifth in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

Even more impressively, he has excelled at the off-field stuff, which was not a given following his initial public appearances and some of his preseason decisions.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an uncommonly inexperienced coaching staff. In contrast to Johnson, who packed their staff with the perfect coaching cocktail of new ideas and veteran savvy, Coen bet on newbies. Starting with the leader himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That kind of approach is exciting in theory, but often collapses in practice – with other teams are a warning – because everyone is figuring out a new job on the fly. Yet Coen has pulled everyone and everything together.

After an early strong start, there was a chance that the season would veer off the rails. A mid-year setback caused the Jags stumbling again. That's typically when leaders overcorrect. He did not. Instead, he streamlined things. The offense stopped pursuing explosive plays and started hunting consistent ones. Coen refocused the attack around key players and the ground attack, and asked his QB to use his mobility more often.

The outcomes are obvious. The Jags have won multiple games consecutively and will be the conference's number three seed. He receives the tiniest knock in the standings because he inherited a talented team, but he has proven he can get the most out of that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, Their Record

Each Coach of the Year argument has a pivotal decision. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback decision.

Parting ways from a incumbent, signing a different quarterback and partnering him with an new offensive coordinator could have derailed the campaign in the early weeks. Instead, it shaped it. Through the mid point of the year, the acquisition was an MVP front-runner. He has fallen away after that time, dropping to 23rd in EPA per dropback over the second half of the schedule, putting him just one place ahead of peers.

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