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Usually, the NFL's Coach of the Year honor follows a simple formula. It commonly functions as a kind of mea culpa. Our apologies we misjudged your franchise in our pre-campaign forecasts.

On paper, it's a direct trajectory: the coach who engineered the biggest turnaround wins the prize. In reality, it sparks an annual debate about expectations and whether we're truly rewarding superior leadership or just the biggest surprise.

However the current field is profoundly unique. The list of candidates is unusually talented. It has been the campaign of turnarounds. The NFL has been chaotic, with recent division champions falling away and recent strugglers rising collectively. Under an normal season, a coach leading the Denver Broncos to the top of the conference would make him the overwhelming front-runner. But in such a wild and thrilling season, he's facing multiple other elite coaches.

This is how the ideal vote could be structured.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, Their Record

Coach of the Year selectors adore signal-callers. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. Should you transform a quarterback, you're halfway home.

The Bears' head coach hasn't just corrected his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. Within an ideal environment, the QB has been afforded the opportunity to showcase 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 consistent dominance. With Johnson, Williams has become increasingly confident, far less reckless, and has eagerly surrendered to the gameplan rather than freelancing. It is an attack designed solely in Johnson's image: a physical ground attack, a heavy helping of play-action passes and a innovative passing attack that creates wide-open targets consistently. Williams has thrived. And when clear throws haven't been available, he's been capable to spin magic out of broken plays.

Johnson came to the Bears with a specific offensive philosophy. Almost every bet – overhauling the trenches, featuring the tight ends, transforming Williams into a timing-based thrower – has worked. This is rare for a first-year head coach. And it's even more uncommon still for a leader who walked into the building with the immense hype he did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the most sought-after name on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a leader, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, he has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a offensive dork but the kind of leader that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.

During a ordinary year, he would be the overwhelming favorite. Yet the current isn't a normal year!

Where his case comes a bit unstuck is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense currently rank 25th in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on takeaways, and takeaways are notoriously unreliable. Coaches can stress ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offensive production is legitimate. He's not higher because variance is doing too much of the defensive heavy lifting. If not for a couple bounces of the ball, the team would be several wins worse off. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the foundation is established for sustained winning. But Johnson falls just short in this ranking.

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

Coen is in a similar spot to Johnson. He's another rookie head coach who has masterminded a swift resurgence. During the crucial final weeks of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best all-around ball of his professional life. And he's also overseen the remaking of a defensive unit that now sits at fifth in the league in EPA per play.

What's more impressively, Coen has mastered the leadership stuff, which was not a guarantee following his early public appearances and some of his preseason moves.

The coach took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally inexperienced staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded their staff with the ideal staff cocktail of new ideas and experience, Coen hired first-timers. Starting with the leader himself to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are filled with rookies. That type of approach is intriguing in theory, but frequently collapses in reality – as past failures are a warning – because everybody is learning a their job on the fly. Yet he has managed to bring everyone and everything together.

Following an early hot beginning, there was a possibility that the season would veer off the rails. A midseason collapse caused the team wobbling once more. That's usually when leaders panic and change too much. Coen didn't. Instead, he simplified things. Jacksonville stopped pursuing explosive plays and started hunting reliable ones. The coach recentered the offense around his playmakers and the ground attack, and encouraged his QB to use his mobility more often.

The results are clear. The Jaguars have won seven games consecutively and will be the conference's No 3 playoff seed. He gets the slightest knock in the rankings because he took over a skilled team, but he has proven he can maximize that talent.

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

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

Moving on from a veteran, signing a new signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative play-caller might have ended the season in the early weeks. Instead, it shaped it. Through the middle point of the season, the acquisition was an MVP front-runner. He has fallen away after that time, slipping to 23rd in EPA per dropback over the latter part of the season, putting him only one place ahead of other QBs.

Still