🔗 Share this article

Ordinarily, the National Football League's Coach of the Year award follows a simple pattern. It commonly acts as a type of mea culpa. Our apologies we got wrong your franchise in our pre-campaign predictions.

Theoretically, it's a direct line: the skipper who orchestrated the most dramatic turnaround wins the award. In reality, it creates an yearly debate about expectations and whether we're actually honoring superior leadership or simply the biggest shock.

Yet the latest race is fundamentally unique. The pool of candidates is exceptionally strong. It has been the year of turnarounds. The league has been chaotic, with reigning division winners falling away and recent underperformers ascending collectively. During an typical year, a coach leading the Denver Broncos to the summit of the AFC would make him the clear front-runner. Yet in this turbulent and fun year, he's up against several other exceptional coaches.

Below is how the projected vote could be structured.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, 11-5

Coach of the Year voters love QBs. They always have. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. Should you solve a franchise QB, you're well on your way to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach didn't merely corrected his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. In the right environment, Williams has been given the chance to showcase his otherworldly ability. From midseason onward, the Bears rank number four in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's sustained performance. Under Johnson, Williams has become increasingly decisive, less careless, and has willingly surrendered to the system instead of improvising. It is an offense built solely in Johnson's image: a physical ground attack, a heavy dose of play-action passes and a creative passing attack that creates wide-open targets everywhere. The QB has capitalized. And when openings haven't been available, he's been able to spin magic out of nothing.

The coach came to Chicago with a defined offensive blueprint. Almost each decision – overhauling the trenches, highlighting the pass-catchers, transforming the QB into a timing-based thrower – has succeeded. That's uncommon for a first-year skipper. And it's rarer still for a leader who entered the building with the level of pressure he did. For two straight cycles, he was the top candidate on the coaching carousel. However when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero guarantees. Somehow, he has lived up to the hype – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a scheme genius but the type of leader that can breathe new life into an franchise.

In a normal season, Johnson would be the runaway choice. But this isn't a normal season!

Where his candidacy comes slightly unstuck is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense currently sit in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on takeaways, and turnovers are famously unreliable. Defensive minds can emphasise creating turnovers, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offensive production is sustainable. He's not higher because luck is doing too much of the defensive heavy lifting. If not for a couple bounces of the ball, the Bears would be two wins worse off. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the foundation is established for long-term success. However he falls just short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar position to his counterpart. He's a fellow rookie head coach who has masterminded a swift turnaround. During the crucial final weeks of the season, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest overall ball of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the remaking of a defense that now ranks fifth in the league in EPA per play.

What's more impressively, Coen has mastered the leadership stuff, which wasn't a given following his early press conference introduction and some of his preseason decisions.

The coach took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally raw coaching staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the ideal staff mix of youth and experience, he trusted newbies. Starting with the leader himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with first-timers. That kind of setup is intriguing on paper, but often fails in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everyone is learning a new job in real-time. But he has pulled the entire group and all elements together.

Following an initial hot start, there was a chance that the campaign would go off the rails. A midseason collapse had the team stumbling again. That's usually when coaches panic and change too much. He didn't. Instead, he simplified the approach. Jacksonville stopped chasing explosive plays and started seeking sustainable ones. Coen recentered the attack around his playmakers and the running game, and encouraged his QB to use his mobility more often.

The outcomes are evident. The Jags have won seven games consecutively and will be the conference's No 3 playoff seed. Coen gets the slightest knock in the rankings because he took over a talented team, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that roster.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record

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

Parting ways from a veteran, bringing in a new quarterback and partnering him with an innovative offensive coordinator might have derailed the season in October. Instead, it made it. Through the mid point of the season, the acquisition was an MVP front-runner. He has fallen away since that time, slipping to 23rd in efficiency per pass attempt over the latter part of the schedule, putting him just a single place ahead of peers.

Still