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Typically, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor follows a straightforward script. It frequently acts as a type of mea culpa. Our apologies we got wrong your team in our pre-campaign projections.

In theory, it's a direct path: the coach who oversaw the most dramatic resurgence wins the award. However, it sparks an yearly discussion about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely honoring superior leadership or merely the greatest surprise.

Yet the current competition is fundamentally different. The pool of candidates is remarkably talented. It has been the year of turnarounds. The NFL has been unpredictable, with recent conference winners declining and recent also-rans ascending collectively. During an normal season, Sean Payton guiding the Denver Broncos to the summit of the conference would make him the stone-cold favorite. Yet in such a chaotic and fun year, he's competing with multiple other outstanding candidates.

This is how the ideal ballot should look.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, 11-5

Coach of the Year selectors love QBs. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. Should you transform a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach not only fixed Caleb Williams; he's freed him. In the right ecosystem, Williams has been afforded the chance to demonstrate his rare ability. From midseason onward, the Bears sit at fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a hot streak – it's prolonged excellence. With Johnson, the quarterback has become more decisive, far less reckless, and has willingly surrendered to the scheme rather than improvising. It is an attack built solely in Johnson's image: a physical ground attack, a heavy dose of play-action passes and a imaginative passing attack that creates wide receiver targets everywhere. Williams has capitalized. And when openings weren't available, he's been able to conjure magic out of broken plays.

Johnson arrived to the Bears with a defined offensive vision. Virtually every decision – overhauling the trenches, featuring the tight ends, transforming Williams into a timing-based passer – has worked. This is rare for a first-year skipper. And it's even more uncommon yet for a leader who entered the building with the immense expectations Johnson did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the top name on the head coaching market. However when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero guarantees. Somehow, he has lived up to expectations – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not only to be a offensive wizard but the kind of culture builder that can breathe fresh energy into an organization.

During a normal year, he would be the clear-cut favorite. But the current isn't a normal campaign!

The area where Johnson's candidacy runs a bit into trouble is on defense. The Bears currently rank 25th in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on takeaways, and takeaways are famously unreliable. Defensive minds can stress ball disruption, but nobody can ensure it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offense is sustainable. He's ranked lower because variance is doing an outsized share of the defensive heavy lifting. If not for a few bounces of the ball, the team would be several victories worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the foundation is established for sustained winning. However Johnson falls just short here.

4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4

Coen is in a comparable spot to his counterpart. He's a fellow rookie head coach who has engineered a rapid resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best overall ball of his career. And he's also spearheaded the remaking of a defensive unit that now ranks fifth in the league in EPA per play.

What's more impressively, he has nailed the intangibles stuff, which was not a guarantee after his early press conference introduction and some of his preseason moves.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an exceptionally inexperienced staff. In contrast to other coaches, who packed themselves with the ideal staff cocktail of new ideas and veteran savvy, he hired newbies. Starting with the head coach himself to coordinators to position coaches, the Jags are filled with rookies. That kind of setup is exciting on paper, but frequently collapses in practice – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everybody is figuring out a their job in real-time. Yet Coen has managed to bring everyone and all elements together.

After an initial strong start, there was a chance that the season would go off the track. A mid-year setback caused the Jags stumbling once more. That's usually when coaches overcorrect. Coen didn't. Instead, he streamlined things. Jacksonville stopped pursuing home-run answers and started hunting sustainable ones. Coen recentered the offense around his playmakers and the running game, and encouraged Lawrence to use his mobility more often.

The results are obvious. The Jaguars have won multiple games consecutively and will be the AFC's No 3 seed. Coen gets the slightest deduction in the standings because he took over a skilled roster, but he has proven he can get the most out of that roster.

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

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

Moving on from a veteran, signing a different quarterback and partnering him with an new offensive coordinator might have derailed the campaign in the early weeks. Instead, it made it. By the mid point of the season, the new QB was an MVP candidate. He has fallen away after that hot streak, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the second half of the schedule, placing him just a single spot ahead of other QBs.

Still