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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor adheres to a straightforward pattern. It commonly acts as a kind of mea culpa. We regret we underestimated your team in our pre-campaign forecasts.

Theoretically, it's a direct path: the coach who engineered the most dramatic improvement is handed the award. In practice, it fuels an yearly debate about expectations and whether we're truly rewarding excellent coaching or just the most shocking surprise.

However the current race is fundamentally different. The list of nominees is unusually deep. It has been the campaign of comebacks. The league has been unpredictable, with recent division champions fading and longtime also-rans improving together. In an typical year, Sean Payton guiding the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the clear front-runner. But in such a turbulent and thrilling year, he's facing five other exceptional coaches.

Below is how the ideal vote ought to shake out.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, 11-5

Coach of the Year voters love QBs. They always have. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. If you solve a quarterback, you're halfway home.

The Bears' head coach didn't merely fixed his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. Given a proper system, Williams has been given the chance to display his special ability. Since midseason onward, the Bears rank fourth in offensive EPA per play. That's not a brief surge – it's prolonged excellence. Under Johnson, the quarterback has become more decisive, far less reckless, and has eagerly surrendered to the gameplan rather than improvising. It is an attack constructed entirely in the coach's vision: a bully-ball ground attack, a steady dose of play-action passes and a imaginative passing attack that creates wide-open targets all over the field. The QB has taken advantage. And when clear throws haven't been available, he's been able to conjure big plays from broken plays.

Johnson came to Chicago with a clear offensive vision. Almost each decision – overhauling the offensive line, utilizing the pass-catchers, turning Williams into a timing-based passer – has paid off. This is rare for a first-year head coach. And it's rarer still for a coach who entered the building with the kind of hype he did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the most sought-after name on the coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are zero guarantees. Somehow, he has lived up to the hype – and even exceeded them. He's proven not only to be a scheme genius but the kind of leader that can breathe new life into an franchise.

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

The area where his case comes a bit unstuck is on defense. The Chicago defense presently rank in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are living on takeaways, and turnovers are famously fickle. Defensive minds can focus on creating turnovers, but no one can guarantee it. He is on the ballot because the offensive production is real. He's not higher because variance is doing too much of the defensive work. With a few bounces of the ball, the Bears would be several wins worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the foundation is in place for sustained winning. But Johnson falls short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, Their Record

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable spot to Johnson. He's a fellow first-time leader who has orchestrated a rapid resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best overall football of his career. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defensive unit that now sits at number five in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more notably, Coen has excelled at the off-field stuff, which wasn't a guarantee after his initial public appearances and some of his preseason moves.

Coen walked into Jacksonville with an uncommonly raw coaching staff. Unlike Johnson, who packed themselves with the perfect staff blend of new ideas and experience, he hired newbies. Starting with the head coach on down to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are filled with first-timers. That type of setup is exciting on paper, but frequently collapses in practice – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everybody is learning a new job in real-time. But Coen has pulled everyone and all elements together.

After an initial hot start, there was a risk that the season would veer off the rails. A midseason collapse caused the team stumbling once more. That's usually when coaches overcorrect. Coen did not. Instead, he streamlined things. The offense stopped chasing home-run answers and started seeking sustainable ones. Coen recentered the offense around key players and the running game, and asked Lawrence to use his mobility more often.

The results are obvious. The Jags have won seven games in a row and will be the AFC's No 3 seed. Coen receives the tiniest deduction in the rankings because he took over a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, 13-3

Every Strong of the Year argument has a pivotal decision. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback decision.

Parting ways from a incumbent, bringing in a new signal-caller and partnering him with an new play-caller might have ended the season in October. Instead, it defined it. By the middle point of the season, the new QB was an MVP front-runner. He has cooled off since that hot streak, dropping to 23rd in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the season, putting him only one place ahead of other QBs.

Still