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Usually, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year award adheres to a simple script. It frequently acts as a kind of apology. Sorry we got wrong your franchise in our pre-campaign forecasts.

In theory, it's a direct path: the coach who oversaw the largest improvement wins the prize. However, it fuels an yearly argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly honoring excellent coaching or just the greatest upset.

Yet the current competition is fundamentally unique. The pool of nominees is remarkably strong. It has been the season of resurgences. The NFL has been messy, with recent conference champions falling away and longtime underperformers rising collectively. In an typical season, Sean Payton guiding the Denver Broncos to the top of the conference would make him the clear favorite. Yet in such a chaotic and entertaining season, he's up against multiple other exceptional candidates.

This is how the projected vote ought to look.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, 11-5

Coach of the Year selectors adore quarterbacks. They always have. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. If you fix a quarterback, you're well on your way home.

The Bears' head coach not only corrected his young quarterback; he's freed him. Within an ideal system, the QB has been afforded the opportunity to demonstrate his rare ability. Since midseason onward, the Chicago offense rank fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's sustained excellence. With Johnson, the quarterback has become increasingly confident, less careless, and has willingly surrendered to the gameplan instead of going rogue. It is an attack built solely in the coach's image: a physical ground attack, a consistent helping of play-action and a creative passing attack that springs wide-open targets all over the field. The QB has taken advantage. And when easy reads weren't available, he's been capable to spin big plays from broken plays.

Johnson arrived to Chicago with a defined offensive blueprint. Almost every bet – rebuilding the offensive line, utilizing the pass-catchers, transforming Williams into a timing-based passer – has worked. This is rare for a rookie head coach. And it's rarer yet for a leader who walked into the building with the kind of expectations he did. For two straight offseasons, he was the hottest name on the head coaching carousel. But when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, he has lived up to expectations – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a offensive dork but the type of culture builder that can inject new life into an organization.

In a normal year, he would be the runaway favorite. But this isn't a normal campaign!

The area where Johnson's candidacy runs slightly unstuck is on defense. The Chicago defense presently rank 25th in defensive efficiency. They are living on turnovers, and takeaways are famously fickle. Defensive minds can focus on ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offensive production is real. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defense's heavy lifting. If not for a few breaks of the ball, the team would be two wins worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the foundation is in place for sustained winning. However Johnson comes up short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable spot to his counterpart. He's another first-time head coach who has orchestrated a dramatic turnaround. During the crucial final weeks of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest all-around football of his career. And he's also overseen the overhaul of a defensive unit that now sits at number five in the NFL in EPA per play.

Even more notably, Coen has nailed the off-field stuff, which wasn't a certainty after his early press conference appearances and some of his preseason decisions.

Coen walked into Jacksonville with an uncommonly inexperienced coaching staff. In contrast to Johnson, who surrounded themselves with the perfect staff mix of youth and veteran savvy, Coen trusted first-timers. Starting with the head coach himself to coordinators to position coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That type of approach is intriguing on paper, but often collapses in practice – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everybody is learning a their job in real-time. But Coen has managed to bring the entire group and all elements into sync.

Following an early hot beginning, there was a possibility that the season would go off the track. A midseason setback caused the Jags wobbling again. That's typically when leaders panic and change too much. Coen didn't. Rather, he simplified things. The offense stopped chasing home-run plays and started seeking sustainable ones. Coen refocused the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and encouraged Lawrence to use his mobility more often.

The outcomes are clear. The Jags have won seven games consecutively and will be the AFC's No 3 playoff seed. Coen gets the slightest deduction in the standings because he inherited a skilled roster, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3

Each Coach of the Year narrative has a defining moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his quarterback choice.

Parting ways from a incumbent, bringing in a new quarterback and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator might have derailed the season in the early weeks. Instead, it defined it. Through the middle point of the season, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has regressed since that hot streak, slipping to 23rd in EPA per dropback over the latter part of the season, putting him just one spot ahead of other QBs.

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