🔗 Share this article

Ordinarily, the NFL's Coach of the Year award follows a simple pattern. It commonly serves as a form of mea culpa. Our apologies we misjudged your team in our pre-campaign forecasts.

On paper, it's a clear-cut line: the coach who oversaw the largest turnaround wins the award. However, it creates an annual debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly honoring superior coaching or simply the biggest shock.

But this year's race is profoundly unique. The group of nominees is exceptionally talented. It has been the season of comebacks. The league has been unpredictable, with reigning conference champions falling away and recent strugglers rising together. During an typical year, Sean Payton leading the Denver Broncos to the summit of the AFC would make him the overwhelming front-runner. But in this wild and entertaining season, he's competing with several other elite coaches.

This is how the ideal ballot ought to look.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, Their Record

Coach of the Year selectors are fascinated by QBs. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. Should you solve a quarterback, you're halfway home.

Ben Johnson didn't merely fixed Caleb Williams; he's unlocked him. Within an ideal environment, Williams has been given the chance to display his special talent. From Week 9, the Bears sit at fourth in offensive EPA per play. That's not a lucky run – it's consistent excellence. Under Johnson, Williams has become more decisive, less reckless, and has eagerly surrendered to the system instead of improvising. It is an attack built solely in Johnson's vision: a bully-ball run game, a consistent dose of play-action and a imaginative aerial game that frees wide-open targets consistently. The QB has taken advantage. And when openings weren't available, he's been able to create big plays from broken plays.

Johnson came to the Bears with a clear offensive philosophy. Almost every decision – overhauling the trenches, utilizing the pass-catchers, turning the QB into a rhythm passer – has paid off. That's rare for a rookie skipper. And it's even more uncommon still for a leader who entered the organization with the level of expectations Johnson did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the top name on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a leader, there are no sure things. Somehow, Johnson has lived up to the hype – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a scheme genius but the kind of leader that can breathe fresh energy into an franchise.

In a normal year, Johnson would be the overwhelming favorite. Yet this is not a typical year!

The area where Johnson's case runs slightly unstuck is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense presently sit 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on takeaways, and takeaways are famously unreliable. Coaches can stress creating turnovers, but no one can ensure 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 heavy lifting. If not for a couple breaks of the ball, the Bears would be two wins worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is established for sustained success. But Johnson comes up short in this ranking.

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

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable situation to his counterpart. He's another first-time head coach who has engineered a rapid resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the most complete overall ball of his career. And he's also overseen the overhaul of a defense that now ranks number five in the league in EPA per play.

Even more notably, Coen has nailed the off-field aspects, which wasn't a guarantee following his early press conference appearances and some of his offseason moves.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an exceptionally raw staff. Unlike Johnson, who packed themselves with the perfect staff mix of new ideas and experience, Coen hired first-timers. Starting with the head coach himself to coordinators to position coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That type of setup is intriguing on paper, but often collapses in practice – as past failures are a warning – because everyone is learning a their job in real-time. But he has pulled the entire group and everything together.

After an initial hot beginning, there was a risk that the season would go off the track. A midseason collapse caused the team wobbling again. That's typically when leaders panic and change too much. Coen did not. Rather, he simplified things. Jacksonville stopped pursuing home-run answers and started seeking reliable ones. The coach refocused the attack around key players and the running game, and asked his QB to use his legs more often.

The outcomes are evident. The Jaguars have won seven games consecutively and will be the AFC's number three playoff seed. Coen receives the slightest knock in the standings because he inherited a talented roster, but he has proven he can get the most out of that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record

Every Strong of the Year case has a pivotal moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback choice.

Parting ways from a incumbent, signing a different quarterback and partnering him with an innovative offensive coordinator might have ended the season in October. Instead, it defined it. Through the mid point of the year, the acquisition was an MVP front-runner. He has fallen away since that hot streak, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per pass attempt over the second half of the schedule, placing him just one place ahead of peers.

Still