🔗 Share this article

Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year award adheres to a simple formula. It often serves as a kind of mea culpa. Sorry we underestimated your squad in our pre-campaign projections.

On paper, it's a direct line: the coach who engineered the biggest resurgence receives the prize. However, it creates an annual argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly honoring excellent leadership or simply the biggest shock.

However the latest competition is fundamentally unique. The list of candidates is exceptionally deep. It has been the campaign of resurgences. The NFL has been chaotic, with reigning conference winners declining and recent also-rans rising together. Under an typical season, a coach guiding the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the overwhelming favorite. Yet in this wild and thrilling year, he's competing with multiple other exceptional coaches.

Below is how the hypothetical vote could shake out.

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

Coach of the Year selectors adore signal-callers. They always have. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. When you solve a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson didn't merely fixed his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. Within an ideal ecosystem, Williams has been given the chance to display his otherworldly talent. Since Week 9, the Chicago offense sit at number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a brief surge – it's sustained excellence. With his guidance, Williams has become increasingly decisive, far less careless, and has willingly surrendered to the gameplan instead of freelancing. It is an offense built solely in Johnson's vision: a physical ground attack, a heavy dose of play-action and a creative passing attack that frees wide receiver targets everywhere. The QB has taken advantage. And when openings weren't there, he's been able to create magic out of nothing.

Johnson arrived to Chicago with a defined offensive blueprint. Almost every gamble – overhauling the trenches, highlighting the tight ends, turning the QB into a timing-based thrower – has paid off. That's uncommon for a rookie head coach. And it's even more uncommon still for a coach who walked into the building with the kind of hype he did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the hottest candidate on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a leader, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, he has lived up to the hype – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not just to be a offensive dork but the kind of culture builder that can breathe new life into an organization.

In a normal year, he would be the clear-cut choice. But the current is not a typical season!

Where Johnson's candidacy comes slightly unstuck is on defense. The Chicago defense presently rank in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on takeaways, and turnovers are famously inconsistent. Coaches can stress ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is sustainable. He's not higher because variance is doing too much of the defensive work. If not for a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be two victories worse off. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the foundation is in place for long-term success. But Johnson falls just short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

Coen is in a similar position to Johnson. He's another first-time leader who has engineered a swift turnaround. During the crucial final weeks of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the most complete all-around football of his professional life. And he's also overseen the remaking of a defensive unit that now sits at fifth in the league in EPA per play.

Even more notably, Coen has mastered the off-field stuff, which wasn't a guarantee following his early public introduction and some of his preseason decisions.

The coach walked into Jacksonville with an exceptionally inexperienced staff. In contrast to Johnson, who surrounded themselves with the ideal coaching mix of new ideas and veteran savvy, Coen trusted newbies. Starting with the head coach on down to assistants to position coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That type of setup is exciting in theory, but often collapses in practice – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a new job on the fly. Yet he has pulled the entire group and everything together.

After an initial hot beginning, there was a chance that the season would go off the track. A midseason collapse had the Jags wobbling once more. That's typically when leaders overcorrect. Coen did not. Instead, he streamlined the approach. The offense stopped pursuing explosive answers and started hunting consistent ones. The coach recentered the attack around his playmakers and the running game, and encouraged his QB to use his legs more often.

The results are evident. The Jaguars have won multiple games in a row and will be the AFC's No 3 playoff seed. Coen receives the slightest deduction in the standings because he inherited a talented roster, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3

Each Strong of the Year argument has a pivotal decision. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB move.

Moving on from a veteran, signing a different quarterback and partnering him with an new offensive coordinator could have derailed the campaign in the early weeks. Instead, it made it. Through the mid point of the year, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player front-runner. He has fallen away after that hot streak, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the schedule, placing him only one place ahead of peers.

Still