The Way This Unusual Campaign Broke the Conventional NFL Coach of the Year Blueprint.

Usually, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor follows a simple formula. It commonly acts as a kind of mea culpa. Our apologies we got wrong your squad in our pre-campaign forecasts.

In theory, it's a clear-cut line: the coach who oversaw the biggest improvement wins the award. In practice, it sparks an annual discussion about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely honoring superior leadership or just the biggest shock.

But this year's field is profoundly different. The group of candidates is unusually strong. It has been the season of resurgences. The league has been unpredictable, with recent division winners falling away and recent strugglers ascending together. In an ordinary year, Sean Payton guiding the his team to the summit of the conference would make him the stone-cold front-runner. But in such a wild and entertaining year, he's facing five other outstanding candidates.

Here is how the ideal vote ought to shake out.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, Their Record

Voters for Coach of the Year selectors are fascinated by signal-callers. History shows this. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. If you fix a franchise QB, you're well on your way to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach hasn't just fixed Caleb Williams; he's freed him. In the right system, Williams has been afforded the chance to display his rare talent. From Week 9, the Bears sit at fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a hot streak – it's prolonged excellence. With Johnson, Williams has become increasingly confident, less careless, and has eagerly surrendered to the scheme rather than freelancing. It is an offense designed entirely in the coach's vision: a physical run game, a heavy helping of play-action passes and a innovative passing attack that creates wide receiver receivers all over the field. Williams has capitalized. And when openings weren't available, he's been capable to spin magic from broken plays.

Johnson arrived to the Bears with a defined offensive blueprint. Almost each bet – rebuilding the trenches, highlighting the pass-catchers, turning the QB into a timing-based passer – has worked. This is rare for a rookie head coach. And it's rarer still for a leader who entered the building with the kind of expectations Johnson did. For two straight offseasons, he was the hottest name on the head coaching market. But when it comes to selecting a leader, there are no guarantees. Remarkably, he has lived up to the hype – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not only to be a offensive dork but the kind of leader that can inject fresh energy into an organization.

During a normal season, he would be the runaway favorite. But this isn't a normal season!

The area where Johnson's candidacy comes slightly into trouble is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense presently sit in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are relying on turnovers, and turnovers are notoriously inconsistent. Defensive minds can focus on ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offensive production is sustainable. He's not higher because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. With a couple bounces of the ball, the Bears would be two wins behind. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is in place for sustained winning. But Johnson comes up just short here.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable spot to his counterpart. He's another first-time leader who has engineered a dramatic turnaround. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest all-around football of his professional life. And he's also overseen the transformation of a defensive unit that now sits at fifth in the NFL in EPA per play.

What's more notably, Coen has nailed the intangibles stuff, which was not a certainty following his initial public introduction and some of his offseason decisions.

Coen walked into the Jaguars with an exceptionally raw coaching staff. In contrast to Johnson, who packed their staff with the ideal coaching cocktail of new ideas and experience, Coen hired first-timers. Starting with the head coach on down to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with first-timers. That kind of setup is exciting in theory, but often collapses in reality – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everybody is figuring out a their job in real-time. But he has managed to bring the entire group and everything together.

After an early strong start, there was a possibility that the season would go off the track. A midseason setback caused the Jags stumbling once more. That's usually when coaches overcorrect. Coen did not. Rather, he simplified things. The offense stopped chasing explosive answers and started seeking reliable ones. The coach recentered the attack around key players and the ground attack, and encouraged his QB to use his legs more often.

The results are clear. The Jags have won multiple games consecutively and will be the AFC's No 3 playoff seed. He receives the slightest deduction in the rankings because he took over a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that roster.

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

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

Moving on from a incumbent, bringing in a different quarterback and pairing him with an new offensive coordinator might have derailed the campaign in October. Instead, it made it. By the mid point of the year, the new QB was an MVP candidate. He has cooled off after that time, slipping to a lower rank in efficiency per pass attempt over the second half of the season, putting him only one place ahead of other QBs.

Still