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Typically, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor adheres to a simple pattern. It often serves as a form of apology. Our apologies we underestimated your team in our pre-campaign predictions.

In theory, it's a direct line: the coach who engineered the largest turnaround receives the prize. In reality, it fuels an yearly discussion about expectations and whether we're truly honoring excellent leadership or merely the biggest surprise.

However this year's race is profoundly unique. The pool of candidates is unusually strong. It has been the campaign of resurgences. The league has been chaotic, with reigning division winners falling away and longtime strugglers ascending together. In an typical year, Sean Payton guiding the Denver Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the clear front-runner. But in such a wild and thrilling season, he's up against several other elite candidates.

This is how the hypothetical vote could shake out.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, Their Record

Coach of the Year selectors love signal-callers. History shows this. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. If you solve a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson didn't merely fixed his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. Within an ideal system, the QB has been afforded the chance to display his special talent. Since Week 9, the Bears sit at fourth in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a lucky run – it's consistent dominance. Under his guidance, the quarterback has become increasingly decisive, far less reckless, and has eagerly surrendered to the system rather than going rogue. It is an attack designed solely in the coach's image: a bully-ball run game, a steady dose of play-action and a creative passing attack that creates wide receiver targets all over the field. The QB has capitalized. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been capable to conjure magic from nothing.

Johnson came to the Bears with a clear offensive philosophy. Almost every bet – rebuilding the trenches, highlighting the tight ends, transforming the QB into a timing-based thrower – has succeeded. This is rare for a first-year skipper. And it's even more uncommon yet for a coach who entered the organization with the kind of hype Johnson did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the top candidate on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, he has lived up to the hype – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not only to be a scheme dork but the type of leader that can breathe fresh energy into an franchise.

During a ordinary year, he would be the overwhelming choice. But the current isn't a normal campaign!

Where his candidacy comes a bit into trouble is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense presently sit in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on takeaways, and takeaways are famously unreliable. Defensive minds can stress ball disruption, but nobody can ensure it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is real. He's not higher because luck is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. If not for a couple bounces of the ball, the team would be two wins worse off. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the core is in place for sustained winning. However he comes up short in this ranking.

4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

Coen is in a similar spot to Johnson. He's a fellow first-time head coach who has engineered a swift turnaround. During the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest overall ball of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the remaking of a defensive unit that now ranks fifth in the NFL in EPA per play.

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

The coach walked into the Jaguars with an uncommonly inexperienced coaching staff. In contrast to other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the ideal staff cocktail of new ideas and experience, Coen trusted newbies. From the leader himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are filled with first-timers. That type of approach is exciting on paper, but frequently collapses in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a new job in real-time. But he has managed to bring the entire group and everything into sync.

After an initial strong beginning, there was a possibility that the season would go off the rails. A midseason setback had the Jags stumbling once more. That's usually when coaches overcorrect. He didn't. Rather, he simplified the approach. Jacksonville stopped pursuing explosive answers and started hunting reliable ones. The coach recentered the offense around key players and the ground attack, and asked Lawrence to use his mobility more often.

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

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

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

Moving on from a veteran, signing a different quarterback and partnering him with an new play-caller could have derailed the season in October. Instead, it defined it. By the mid point of the year, the new QB was an MVP front-runner. He has regressed after that hot streak, slipping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the second half of the season, placing him just a single spot ahead of other QBs.

Still