🔗 Share this article

Usually, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year honor follows a simple formula. It commonly acts as a form of mea culpa. Our apologies we misjudged your team in our pre-campaign forecasts.

Theoretically, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the coach who orchestrated the most dramatic turnaround wins the award. In practice, it creates an annual argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're actually honoring superior leadership or merely the greatest surprise.

However the latest race is fundamentally unique. The group of candidates is unusually strong. It has been the campaign of comebacks. The NFL has been messy, with reigning division winners declining and recent underperformers rising in unison. Under an ordinary season, a coach leading the Denver Broncos to the summit of the AFC would make him the stone-cold favorite. But in such a turbulent and entertaining year, he's facing multiple other elite candidates.

This is how the projected vote ought to be structured.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, Chicago Bears, Their Record

Voters for Coach of the Year voters are fascinated by quarterbacks. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. When you transform a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach didn't merely corrected his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. Given a proper system, Williams has been given the opportunity to showcase his otherworldly talent. From midseason onward, the Bears sit at number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a brief surge – it's consistent excellence. Under his guidance, the quarterback has become increasingly confident, far less reckless, and has willingly surrendered to the scheme rather than improvising. It is an attack built solely in Johnson's vision: a physical ground attack, a consistent helping of play-action passes and a innovative passing attack that springs wide receiver targets consistently. The QB has capitalized. And when easy reads haven't been available, he's been able to spin big plays from nothing.

Johnson came to the Bears with a clear offensive vision. Almost each gamble – overhauling the trenches, featuring the tight ends, transforming Williams into a timing-based thrower – has succeeded. This is uncommon for a rookie head coach. And it's even more uncommon yet for a coach who walked into the organization with the immense hype Johnson did. For two straight cycles, he was the top candidate on the head coaching market. However when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has met expectations – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not just to be a scheme dork but the type of culture builder that can inject fresh energy into an organization.

During a normal season, he would be the runaway favorite. But this isn't a normal campaign!

Where Johnson's case runs a bit unstuck is on the defensive side. The Bears presently sit in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on turnovers, and turnovers are famously unreliable. Coaches can emphasise creating turnovers, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is legitimate. 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 several victories worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is established for sustained success. However he comes up just short here.

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

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable position to his counterpart. He's another first-time head coach who has orchestrated a rapid resurgence. During the stretch run of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest all-around ball of his career. And he's also spearheaded the remaking of a defensive unit that now ranks number five in the NFL in EPA per play.

What's more impressively, he has excelled at the off-field aspects, which was not a certainty after his early public appearances and some of his preseason moves.

Coen walked into Jacksonville with an uncommonly inexperienced coaching staff. In contrast to other coaches, who packed themselves with the ideal coaching cocktail of youth and veteran savvy, Coen bet on first-timers. From the leader himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with first-timers. That kind of setup is exciting on paper, but often fails in reality – as past failures are a warning – because everyone is learning a their job in real-time. But Coen has managed to bring everyone and everything into sync.

After an initial hot start, there was a possibility that the season would veer off the track. A midseason setback caused the team wobbling again. That's usually when leaders panic and change too much. He didn't. Instead, he streamlined things. The offense stopped pursuing home-run plays and started hunting reliable ones. Coen recentered the offense around his playmakers and the ground attack, and asked Lawrence to use his mobility more often.

The results are obvious. The Jaguars have won multiple games consecutively and will be the AFC's No 3 playoff seed. He gets the tiniest knock in the standings because he took over a skilled roster, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that roster.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, Their Record

Each Strong of the Year case has a hinge moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB decision.

Parting ways from a incumbent, bringing in a new signal-caller and pairing him with an new offensive coordinator could have ended the campaign in the early weeks. Instead, it shaped it. By the mid point of the year, the new QB was an MVP candidate. He has cooled off after that time, dropping to 23rd in EPA per pass attempt over the second half of the season, putting him just a single spot ahead of other QBs.

Still