🔗 Share this article

Ordinarily, the National Football League's Coach of the Year award adheres to a straightforward pattern. It frequently serves as a form of apology. Our apologies we misjudged your franchise in our preseason projections.

On paper, it's a direct path: the skipper who engineered the biggest resurgence wins the award. In practice, it fuels an yearly debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely honoring excellent coaching or just the most shocking shock.

However the current race is profoundly different. The group of contenders is unusually deep. It has been the season of comebacks. The NFL has been chaotic, with reigning conference winners fading and recent underperformers improving in unison. In an ordinary year, a coach leading the Denver Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the clear front-runner. But in this wild and fun year, he's competing with five other exceptional candidates.

Below is how the projected vote should look.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, 11-5

Voters for Coach of the Year selectors love quarterbacks. They always have. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. Should you fix a franchise QB, you're halfway home.

Ben Johnson didn't merely corrected Caleb Williams; he's unlocked him. In the right ecosystem, Williams has been given the opportunity to showcase his rare talent. From midseason onward, the Chicago offense sit at fourth in offensive EPA per play. That's not a lucky run – it's sustained excellence. With Johnson, the quarterback has become more confident, less careless, and has eagerly surrendered to the system instead of freelancing. It is an attack designed solely in Johnson's vision: a physical ground attack, a steady dose of play-action passes and a imaginative passing attack that springs wide receiver targets consistently. The QB has capitalized. And when easy reads weren't available, he's been able to create magic from broken plays.

The coach came to the Bears with a specific offensive blueprint. Almost every gamble – overhauling the trenches, utilizing the tight ends, transforming Williams into a rhythm passer – has worked. That's uncommon 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 most sought-after candidate on the coaching market. But when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are no guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not just to be a scheme genius but the kind of culture builder that can breathe fresh energy into an organization.

In a typical season, Johnson would be the runaway favorite. But this is not a normal campaign!

The area where Johnson's case runs slightly into trouble is on defense. The Chicago defense presently sit 25th in defensive success rate. They are surviving on turnovers, and takeaways are notoriously fickle. Coaches can emphasise ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offense is legitimate. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defensive heavy lifting. With a few bounces of the ball, the Bears would be two victories behind. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is established for long-term success. But he falls just short here.

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

Coen is in a comparable situation to Johnson. He's another rookie leader who has orchestrated a swift turnaround. During the crucial final weeks of the season, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best all-around ball of his career. And he's also spearheaded the transformation of a defensive unit that now sits at number five in the NFL in Expected Points Added per play.

Even more impressively, Coen has excelled at the leadership stuff, which wasn't a certainty following his initial public introduction and some of his offseason decisions.

The coach took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally raw coaching staff. Unlike Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the perfect coaching cocktail of new ideas and experience, he trusted first-timers. From the leader on down to assistants to position coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That kind of approach is intriguing in theory, but frequently collapses in reality – as past failures are a warning – because everyone is learning a new job on the fly. But he has managed to bring the entire group and everything together.

After an early hot start, there was a risk that the season would veer off the track. A midseason setback caused the team stumbling once more. That's usually when coaches overcorrect. He did not. Instead, he simplified things. The offense stopped pursuing explosive plays and started seeking sustainable ones. Coen refocused the offense around his playmakers and the running game, and asked Lawrence to use his mobility more often.

The results are evident. The Jaguars have won seven games in a row and will be the conference's No 3 playoff seed. Coen receives the slightest knock in the rankings because he inherited a talented roster, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that talent.

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

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

Moving on from a veteran, signing a different quarterback and pairing him with an innovative play-caller might have ended the season in October. Rather, it made it. By the middle point of the season, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has cooled off after that hot streak, slipping to 23rd in EPA per dropback over the latter part of the schedule, putting him just one spot ahead of peers.

Still