🔗 Share this article

Usually, the National Football League's Coach of the Year trophy follows a straightforward script. It often functions as a kind of apology. We regret we underestimated your franchise in our pre-campaign forecasts.

On paper, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the coach who orchestrated the largest resurgence wins the prize. In reality, it fuels an yearly debate about expectations and whether we're genuinely honoring excellent coaching or merely the greatest surprise.

But this year's race is fundamentally unique. The list of nominees is remarkably deep. It has been the year of comebacks. The NFL has been chaotic, with recent division champions falling away and longtime strugglers rising together. During an typical year, Sean Payton leading the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the overwhelming favorite. But in this wild and thrilling season, he's up against five other outstanding candidates.

Below is how the hypothetical vote could look.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, His Team, 11-5

Coach of the Year selectors adore signal-callers. History shows this. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. When you transform a franchise QB, you're halfway home.

The Bears' head coach hasn't just fixed his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. Within an ideal environment, Williams has been afforded the opportunity to display his rare talent. From Week 9, the Bears rank number four in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a lucky run – it's consistent performance. Under Johnson, Williams has become increasingly confident, less reckless, and has eagerly surrendered to the system rather than improvising. It is an attack constructed solely in Johnson's image: a bully-ball ground attack, a consistent dose of play-action and a creative passing attack that frees wide receiver targets everywhere. The QB has capitalized. And when easy reads weren't available, he's been able to conjure big plays out of nothing.

Johnson came to the Bears with a defined offensive vision. Virtually each decision – overhauling the trenches, utilizing the tight ends, transforming the QB into a timing-based thrower – has paid off. This is uncommon for a first-year head coach. And it's rarer still for a leader who entered the organization with the kind of hype he did. For two straight cycles, he was the top name on the coaching market. But when it comes to selecting a leader, there are no guarantees. Somehow, Johnson has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not just to be a scheme wizard but the type of leader that can inject new life into an organization.

In a normal season, Johnson would be the overwhelming favorite. Yet the current isn't a normal year!

The area where Johnson's candidacy runs slightly into trouble is on defense. The Chicago defense presently rank 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on turnovers, and takeaways are famously unreliable. Defensive minds can focus on creating turnovers, but nobody can guarantee it. He is on the list because the offensive production is sustainable. He's ranked lower because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. If not for a few breaks of the ball, the team would be several wins worse off. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is in place for sustained success. However he comes up short here.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4

Coen is in a comparable situation to his counterpart. He's another rookie head coach who has orchestrated a swift resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best overall football of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the transformation of a defensive unit that now sits at fifth in the NFL in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more notably, Coen has mastered the intangibles stuff, which wasn't a guarantee following his initial press conference appearances and some of his offseason moves.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an exceptionally raw coaching staff. Unlike other coaches, who packed their staff with the ideal coaching blend of youth and experience, Coen hired newbies. Starting with the head coach himself to coordinators to position coaches, the Jags are filled with first-timers. That kind of approach is intriguing in theory, but frequently fails in practice – with other teams are a warning – because everyone is learning a new job on the fly. But Coen has managed to bring the entire group and all elements into sync.

After an initial hot start, there was a possibility that the campaign would go off the track. A midseason collapse had the team stumbling again. That's usually when leaders overcorrect. He didn't. Rather, he streamlined things. Jacksonville stopped pursuing home-run plays and started hunting reliable ones. The coach recentered the offense around key players and the running game, and encouraged his QB to use his legs more often.

The results are evident. The Jaguars have won multiple games in a row and will be the AFC's number three seed. Coen receives the tiniest knock in the standings because he took over a talented roster, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that roster.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, 13-3

Each Coach of the Year narrative has a pivotal decision. For the Seahawks coach, it was his quarterback move.

Moving on from a veteran, bringing in a different quarterback and partnering him with an innovative offensive coordinator could have derailed the season in the early weeks. Rather, it defined it. By the middle point of the year, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player front-runner. He has fallen away after that hot streak, dropping to 23rd in efficiency per pass attempt over the latter part of the season, placing him just a single place ahead of peers.

Still