🔗 Share this article

Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year honor adheres to a straightforward pattern. It often acts as a kind of apology. Our apologies we misjudged your squad in our preseason projections.

In theory, it's a direct path: the coach who orchestrated the most dramatic improvement wins the prize. In reality, it sparks an yearly argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely honoring superior leadership or merely the greatest shock.

But the current field is fundamentally different. The pool of candidates is unusually talented. It has been the year of turnarounds. The NFL has been messy, with recent conference winners falling away and longtime underperformers improving together. In an normal season, Sean Payton leading the his team to the summit of the conference would make him the stone-cold front-runner. But in such a turbulent and thrilling year, he's facing multiple other elite coaches.

Here is how the projected vote ought to shake out.

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

Coach of the Year selectors adore quarterbacks. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. When you transform a franchise QB, you're halfway home.

Ben Johnson hasn't just fixed his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. Given a proper system, the QB has been given the opportunity to showcase his rare ability. From midseason onward, the Bears rank fourth in offensive EPA per play. That's not a brief surge – it's prolonged dominance. Under Johnson, Williams has become increasingly decisive, less careless, and has eagerly surrendered to the gameplan rather than freelancing. It is an offense built solely in Johnson's vision: a physical run game, a heavy dose of play-action passes and a imaginative passing attack that creates wide-open targets consistently. The QB has capitalized. And when easy reads weren't available, he's been capable to create big plays from broken plays.

The coach arrived to Chicago with a defined offensive vision. Almost each gamble – overhauling the trenches, highlighting the tight ends, turning the QB into a timing-based passer – has succeeded. This is rare for a first-year head coach. And it's even more uncommon yet for a coach who walked into the building with the immense expectations he did. For two straight cycles, he was the top candidate on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has met the hype – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not just to be a offensive genius but the kind of leader that can breathe fresh energy into an franchise.

During a typical year, he would be the runaway favorite. Yet the current isn't a normal season!

Where Johnson's candidacy runs slightly into trouble is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense currently sit in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are living on turnovers, and takeaways are famously unreliable. Defensive minds can stress ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offense is real. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defensive work. If not for a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be two victories worse off. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the foundation is in place for sustained success. However he comes up short in this ranking.

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

Coen is in a similar spot to Johnson. He's another rookie head coach who has orchestrated a rapid resurgence. During the crucial final weeks of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest all-around ball of his career. And he's also overseen the transformation of a defensive unit that now ranks number five in the NFL in EPA per play.

What's more notably, he has mastered the leadership stuff, which wasn't a certainty following his early press conference introduction and some of his offseason moves.

The coach walked into Jacksonville with an uncommonly inexperienced staff. In contrast to Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the perfect staff cocktail of new ideas and experience, Coen trusted first-timers. From the head coach on down to assistants to position coaches, the Jags are filled with rookies. That type of setup is intriguing on paper, but frequently collapses in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a new job on the fly. But he has pulled the entire group and all elements into sync.

After an initial hot start, there was a risk that the campaign would veer off the track. A mid-year collapse caused the team stumbling once more. That's typically when leaders overcorrect. He did not. Instead, he simplified things. The offense stopped chasing home-run answers and started hunting reliable ones. Coen refocused the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and encouraged Lawrence to use his legs more often.

The outcomes are evident. The Jaguars have won seven games in a row and will be the AFC's number three seed. Coen receives the slightest knock in the rankings because he took over a skilled roster, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record

Every Strong of the Year narrative has a hinge decision. For the Seahawks coach, it was his quarterback move.

Moving on from a veteran, bringing in a different signal-caller and pairing him with an new play-caller could have ended the campaign in the early weeks. Rather, it made it. By the mid point of the season, the acquisition was an MVP front-runner. He has fallen away after that time, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per pass attempt over the latter part of the schedule, placing him just one place ahead of other QBs.

Still