🔗 Share this article

Typically, the National Football League's Coach of the Year award adheres to a straightforward formula. It commonly acts as a kind of mea culpa. Sorry we underestimated your team in our pre-campaign projections.

On paper, it's a clear-cut path: the coach who engineered the biggest turnaround wins the prize. However, it fuels an yearly debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're actually honoring excellent leadership or just the biggest surprise.

But this year's field is fundamentally unique. The list of candidates is unusually deep. It has been the season of turnarounds. The NFL has been chaotic, with recent division winners fading and recent underperformers ascending together. In an typical season, a coach guiding the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the clear front-runner. But in such a wild and thrilling year, he's facing several other elite candidates.

Here is how the hypothetical ballot ought to look.

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

Voters for Coach of the Year voters love signal-callers. History shows this. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. Should you solve a quarterback, you're halfway home.

The Bears' head coach not only corrected his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. In the right system, Williams has been given the chance to display his rare talent. Since Week 9, the Bears rank fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a brief surge – it's prolonged excellence. Under his guidance, Williams has become increasingly confident, less careless, and has willingly surrendered to the scheme instead of improvising. It is an offense constructed solely in Johnson's vision: a physical run game, a consistent dose of play-action and a innovative passing attack that creates wide receiver targets consistently. Williams has capitalized. And when easy reads weren't available, he's been capable to conjure magic from nothing.

The coach came to the Bears with a specific offensive blueprint. Almost each bet – overhauling the offensive line, utilizing the pass-catchers, turning Williams into a timing-based passer – has succeeded. That's rare for a first-year head coach. And it's even more uncommon still for a leader who entered the organization with the immense hype Johnson did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the top candidate on the head coaching carousel. But when it comes to hiring a leader, there are no guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has lived up to expectations – and even surpassed them. He's proven not only to be a scheme wizard but the kind of culture builder that can breathe fresh energy into an franchise.

During a ordinary season, Johnson would be the overwhelming choice. Yet the current isn't a normal year!

The area where his candidacy comes a bit unstuck is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense presently rank 25th in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on takeaways, and turnovers are famously fickle. Coaches can focus on ball disruption, but nobody can ensure it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offense is legitimate. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defense's heavy lifting. If not for a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be several wins worse off. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the core is established for sustained winning. But he comes up just short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4

Coen is in a comparable situation to his counterpart. He's another first-time leader who has masterminded a swift turnaround. During the stretch run of the season, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest overall ball of his professional life. And he's also overseen the transformation of a defense that now ranks fifth in the league in EPA per play.

What's more notably, Coen has excelled at the off-field aspects, which wasn't a certainty following his early public appearances and some of his offseason moves.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an uncommonly raw coaching staff. Unlike Johnson, who packed their staff with the perfect coaching mix of youth and experience, he bet on newbies. Starting with the leader himself to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are filled with rookies. That kind of approach is exciting on paper, but often fails in practice – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a their job in real-time. Yet Coen has managed to bring the entire group and all elements together.

Following an early strong beginning, there was a chance that the season would veer off the rails. A mid-year setback caused the Jags wobbling again. That's typically when coaches panic and change too much. Coen didn't. Rather, he simplified things. The offense stopped pursuing home-run answers and started seeking reliable ones. The coach refocused the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and encouraged his QB to use his legs more.

The outcomes are evident. The Jags have won multiple games consecutively and will be the conference's number three seed. He gets the tiniest knock in the rankings because he inherited a skilled roster, but he has proven he can get the most out of that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, 13-3

Each Coach of the Year narrative has a hinge moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB choice.

Moving on from a incumbent, signing a new signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator might have derailed the season in the early weeks. Instead, it defined it. By the mid point of the year, the acquisition was an MVP contender. He has regressed after that time, dropping to 23rd in efficiency per pass attempt over the second half of the schedule, putting him just one place ahead of other QBs.

Still