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Typically, the National Football League's Coach of the Year award follows a simple pattern. It commonly serves as a kind of apology. Our apologies we got wrong your squad in our preseason projections.

Theoretically, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the skipper who orchestrated the most dramatic resurgence is handed the prize. In practice, it creates an annual debate about expectations and whether we're truly honoring superior coaching or just the most shocking surprise.

However the latest race is fundamentally different. The group of candidates is exceptionally deep. It has been the year of turnarounds. The NFL has been messy, with recent division winners declining and longtime underperformers ascending collectively. In an ordinary season, a coach guiding the Denver Broncos to the summit of the AFC would make him the overwhelming front-runner. Yet in this turbulent and entertaining year, he's up against several other outstanding coaches.

This is how the hypothetical ballot should be structured.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, 11-5

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

The Bears' head coach not only fixed Caleb Williams; he's freed him. Within an ideal environment, the QB has been given the opportunity to demonstrate his rare talent. Since midseason onward, the Chicago offense sit at fourth in offensive EPA per play. That's not a brief surge – it's prolonged dominance. With Johnson, the quarterback has become more confident, far less careless, and has willingly surrendered to the gameplan instead of improvising. It is an offense built solely in the coach's vision: a physical ground attack, a steady helping of play-action passes and a innovative aerial game that springs wide-open receivers all over the field. Williams has capitalized. And when easy reads haven't been available, he's been able to spin big plays out of nothing.

Johnson arrived to the Bears with a clear offensive blueprint. Virtually every decision – overhauling the trenches, featuring the pass-catchers, transforming Williams into a rhythm passer – has worked. This is rare for a rookie skipper. And it's even more uncommon yet for a coach who walked into the organization with the level of expectations Johnson did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the most sought-after candidate on the head coaching market. But when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are no guarantees. Remarkably, he has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a scheme genius but the kind of leader that can inject new life into an organization.

In a normal year, he would be the runaway favorite. Yet the current is not a normal season!

Where his candidacy comes slightly into trouble is on defense. The Chicago defense presently rank in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on turnovers, and takeaways are famously inconsistent. Defensive minds can emphasise ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is sustainable. He's ranked lower because variance is doing an outsized share of the defensive heavy lifting. If not for a few breaks 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 Johnson falls just short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

Coen is in a comparable situation to his counterpart. He's another first-time head coach who has orchestrated a swift turnaround. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best overall football of his career. And he's also overseen the transformation of a defense that now sits at fifth in the NFL in EPA per play.

Even more impressively, he has mastered the off-field aspects, which was not a guarantee following his initial public introduction and some of his offseason moves.

Coen walked into the Jaguars with an exceptionally raw staff. In contrast to Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the perfect coaching cocktail of youth and experience, Coen trusted first-timers. Starting with the leader himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are filled with rookies. That kind of approach is intriguing on paper, but frequently fails in reality – with other teams are a warning – because everybody is learning a new job on the fly. But he has pulled the entire group and all elements into sync.

Following an initial strong start, there was a possibility that the season would veer off the track. A mid-year collapse had the Jags wobbling once more. That's usually when coaches panic and change too much. Coen did not. Instead, he streamlined things. The offense stopped pursuing explosive answers and started seeking sustainable ones. The coach refocused the offense around his playmakers and the ground attack, and asked his QB to use his mobility more.

The outcomes are clear. The Jaguars have won seven games in a row and will be the conference's No 3 seed. He gets the tiniest deduction in the standings because he inherited a skilled team, but he has demonstrated 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 pivotal decision. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback move.

Moving on from a veteran, bringing in a different signal-caller and partnering him with an new play-caller might have ended the season in the early weeks. Instead, it shaped it. By the middle point of the season, the acquisition was an MVP front-runner. He has regressed since that hot streak, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the second half of the schedule, putting him just one place ahead of other QBs.

Still