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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year honor adheres to a simple script. It commonly functions as a kind of mea culpa. We regret we misjudged your squad in our preseason projections.

Theoretically, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the skipper who engineered the largest improvement receives the award. In practice, it sparks an yearly argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly honoring superior leadership or simply the greatest surprise.

Yet this year's race is profoundly different. The pool of nominees is exceptionally talented. It has been the year of turnarounds. The NFL has been unpredictable, with recent division champions fading and longtime also-rans rising in unison. Under an normal season, a coach guiding the Denver Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the overwhelming favorite. But in such a chaotic and fun year, he's facing several other exceptional coaches.

This is how the ideal vote should look.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, 11-5

Coach of the Year voters are fascinated by quarterbacks. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. When you fix a quarterback, you're halfway home.

Ben Johnson hasn't just fixed his young quarterback; he's freed him. Given a proper system, the QB has been afforded the opportunity to display his rare talent. Since midseason onward, the Chicago offense rank fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a brief surge – it's prolonged performance. With his guidance, the quarterback has become more decisive, less reckless, and has willingly submitted to the system instead of freelancing. It is an offense constructed solely in the coach's image: a bully-ball run game, a steady dose of play-action and a imaginative aerial game that frees wide receiver receivers everywhere. Williams has taken advantage. And when easy reads weren't available, he's been able to create big plays out of broken plays.

The coach arrived to Chicago with a defined offensive philosophy. Almost each decision – rebuilding the offensive line, utilizing the pass-catchers, transforming Williams into a timing-based thrower – has succeeded. This is rare for a first-year skipper. And it's rarer still for a coach who walked into the building with the immense hype Johnson did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the hottest name on the head coaching market. But when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero sure things. Somehow, he has lived up to the hype – and even exceeded them. He's proven not just to be a offensive wizard but the kind of culture builder that can breathe fresh energy into an franchise.

During a ordinary year, Johnson would be the clear-cut choice. Yet the current is not a normal year!

The area where his case runs slightly into trouble is on defense. The Bears presently rank 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on takeaways, and turnovers are notoriously fickle. Defensive minds can stress ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offensive production is real. He's ranked lower because variance is doing an outsized share of the defensive work. With a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be two wins worse off. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the foundation is in place for long-term success. However he comes up short in this ranking.

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

Coen is in a similar spot to his counterpart. He's a fellow first-time head coach who has masterminded a swift turnaround. 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 overseen the overhaul of a defensive unit that now ranks number five in the NFL in EPA per play.

Even more impressively, he has excelled at the intangibles stuff, which was not a guarantee after his early press conference introduction and some of his offseason decisions.

Coen took over the Jaguars with an exceptionally inexperienced staff. Unlike Johnson, who packed themselves with the perfect coaching blend of youth and experience, Coen bet on first-timers. Starting with the head coach himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are filled with first-timers. That type of setup is intriguing on paper, but often collapses in practice – as past failures are a warning – because everybody is learning a new job on the fly. But he has managed to bring the entire group and all elements into sync.

Following an initial strong start, there was a possibility that the season would veer off the track. A midseason collapse had the Jags wobbling once more. That's typically when leaders panic and change too much. Coen didn't. Rather, he streamlined things. The offense stopped chasing home-run answers and started seeking reliable ones. The coach refocused the attack around key players and the running game, and asked Lawrence to use his legs more.

The results are obvious. The Jags have won multiple games in a row and will be the conference's number three playoff seed. He receives the slightest deduction in the rankings because he inherited a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that talent.

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

Every Coach of the Year argument has a hinge moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB choice.

Moving on from a incumbent, bringing in a different signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative play-caller could have derailed the season in the early weeks. Rather, it shaped it. By the middle point of the season, the acquisition was an MVP candidate. He has cooled off since that time, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the season, putting him only a single place ahead of other QBs.

Still