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Typically, the National Football League's Coach of the Year trophy adheres to a straightforward pattern. It frequently acts as a form of mea culpa. Our apologies we underestimated your franchise in our pre-campaign forecasts.

Theoretically, it's a clear-cut line: the skipper who orchestrated the largest improvement wins the award. However, it fuels an yearly debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're actually honoring excellent coaching or merely the most shocking upset.

Yet this year's race is profoundly different. The pool of contenders is unusually talented. It has been the year of resurgences. The NFL has been unpredictable, with reigning conference champions declining and recent underperformers ascending together. In an normal year, a coach guiding the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the overwhelming front-runner. But in this turbulent and entertaining season, he's up against several other outstanding candidates.

Here is how the projected ballot should be structured.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, 11-5

Voters for Coach of the Year selectors love QBs. History shows this. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. When you fix a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach hasn't just fixed Caleb Williams; he's freed him. In the right system, Williams has been given the chance to display his special ability. Since midseason onward, the Chicago offense sit at number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's consistent excellence. With his guidance, the quarterback has become increasingly decisive, less careless, and has eagerly submitted to the system instead of going rogue. It is an offense built solely in Johnson's image: a physical ground attack, a heavy dose of play-action and a imaginative passing attack that springs wide-open receivers consistently. Williams has capitalized. And when openings haven't been there, he's been capable to create magic from broken plays.

Johnson arrived to the Bears with a defined offensive philosophy. Virtually every bet – overhauling the trenches, featuring the pass-catchers, turning the QB into a rhythm passer – has worked. This is rare for a first-year head coach. And it's rarer yet for a coach who walked into the organization with the kind of expectations he did. For two straight offseasons, he was the top candidate on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to selecting a leader, there are no sure things. Somehow, Johnson has lived up to expectations – and even exceeded them. He's proven not only to be a scheme dork but the type of culture builder that can inject new life into an organization.

In a typical season, Johnson would be the clear-cut choice. Yet this isn't a normal season!

The area where Johnson's candidacy runs a bit unstuck is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense currently rank in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on takeaways, 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 real. He's not higher because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's heavy lifting. With a couple breaks of the ball, the Bears would be several victories behind. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is established for long-term winning. However Johnson falls short here.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar position to Johnson. He's a fellow first-time head coach who has engineered a dramatic resurgence. During the stretch run of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest all-around football of his professional life. And he's also overseen the remaking of a defensive unit that now sits at fifth in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more notably, he has excelled at the intangibles aspects, which was not a given after 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 surrounded themselves with the ideal staff blend of youth and veteran savvy, he trusted first-timers. Starting with the head coach on down to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jags are filled with first-timers. That kind of setup is intriguing in theory, but frequently collapses in reality – with other teams are a warning – because everybody is learning a their job in real-time. Yet Coen has managed to bring everyone and all elements together.

Following an early hot start, there was a risk that the season would veer off the rails. A mid-year setback had the Jags stumbling again. That's usually when leaders panic and change too much. He didn't. Instead, he streamlined things. The offense stopped chasing home-run plays and started hunting sustainable ones. The coach refocused the offense around key players and the running game, and encouraged Lawrence to use his legs more often.

The outcomes are obvious. The Jags have won seven games in a row and will be the AFC's No 3 playoff seed. He gets the tiniest knock in the standings because he inherited a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that roster.

3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record

Every Coach of the Year case has a hinge decision. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB move.

Parting ways from a incumbent, bringing in a different quarterback and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator could have ended the season in the early weeks. Instead, it defined it. By the mid point of the year, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player candidate. He has cooled off since that time, dropping to 23rd in efficiency per dropback over the second half of the season, placing him only a single spot ahead of peers.

Still