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Usually, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year honor adheres to a straightforward pattern. It commonly functions as a form of mea culpa. Our apologies we got wrong your team in our pre-campaign predictions.

Theoretically, it's a direct trajectory: the coach who engineered the largest improvement receives the prize. In practice, it creates an yearly discussion about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely rewarding superior leadership or just the most shocking shock.

Yet this year's race is distinctly unique. The pool of candidates is exceptionally strong. It has been the season of turnarounds. The league has been chaotic, with reigning division winners declining and longtime underperformers rising together. During an ordinary year, a coach guiding the Denver Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the stone-cold front-runner. But in this chaotic and entertaining season, he's facing multiple other outstanding coaches.

This is how the hypothetical vote should be structured.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, His Team, 11-5

Coach of the Year voters love quarterbacks. History shows this. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. If you fix a quarterback, you're well on your way home.

Ben Johnson didn't merely corrected his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. Within an ideal environment, the QB has been given the opportunity to display his special ability. From Week 9, the Chicago offense rank number four in offensive EPA per play. That's not a hot streak – it's prolonged performance. With his guidance, the quarterback has become more decisive, far less careless, and has eagerly submitted to the scheme rather than going rogue. It is an offense constructed solely in Johnson's vision: a physical run game, a consistent helping of play-action passes and a creative passing attack that springs wide receiver targets everywhere. The QB has capitalized. And when easy reads haven't been available, he's been capable to spin magic out of nothing.

Johnson arrived to Chicago with a defined offensive blueprint. Almost every gamble – overhauling the trenches, utilizing the tight ends, transforming the QB into a rhythm thrower – has succeeded. That's uncommon for a rookie skipper. And it's even more uncommon yet for a coach who walked into the building with the level of expectations he did. For two straight cycles, he was the top name on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to selecting a leader, there are no guarantees. Somehow, Johnson has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not just to be a scheme wizard but the kind of culture builder that can inject new life into an organization.

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

Where Johnson's case comes a bit unstuck is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense presently rank in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are relying on turnovers, and takeaways are notoriously fickle. Coaches can stress creating turnovers, but no one can ensure it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offense is legitimate. He's not higher because variance is doing too much of the defensive heavy lifting. With a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be several wins worse off. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the foundation is in place for long-term winning. But he comes up short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, Their Record

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable position to Johnson. He's another rookie leader who has orchestrated a dramatic resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best all-around ball of his career. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defense that now ranks number five in the league in EPA per play.

Even more notably, Coen has mastered the leadership stuff, which was not a given following his initial public appearances and some of his offseason moves.

Coen walked into Jacksonville with an uncommonly raw coaching staff. In contrast to other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the perfect coaching cocktail of new ideas and veteran savvy, Coen hired newbies. Starting with the leader himself to coordinators to position coaches, the Jags are stocked with rookies. That type of approach is intriguing in theory, but often fails in practice – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everybody is learning a their job in real-time. But he has pulled the entire group and everything into sync.

Following an initial strong beginning, there was a risk that the campaign would go off the track. A mid-year collapse caused the Jags stumbling once more. That's typically when leaders overcorrect. He did not. Rather, he streamlined the approach. Jacksonville stopped chasing explosive plays and started hunting sustainable ones. The coach refocused the attack around key players and the running game, and asked his QB to use his mobility more often.

The outcomes are obvious. The Jaguars have won multiple games in a row and will be the conference's No 3 playoff seed. He receives the slightest deduction in the standings because he took over a skilled team, but he has proven he can get the most out of that roster.

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

Every Coach of the Year argument has a hinge decision. For the Seahawks coach, it was his quarterback move.

Parting ways from a incumbent, signing a new signal-caller and partnering him with an innovative offensive coordinator could have derailed the campaign in October. Instead, it defined it. Through the middle point of the season, the acquisition was an MVP contender. He has regressed since that time, slipping to 23rd in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the season, placing him just a single spot ahead of other QBs.

Still