🔗 Share this article

Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year trophy follows a simple pattern. It often acts as a form of mea culpa. Sorry we got wrong your team in our pre-campaign forecasts.

In theory, it's a direct trajectory: the skipper who engineered the biggest turnaround is handed the award. However, it fuels an annual discussion about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely rewarding excellent leadership or merely the most shocking shock.

But the latest competition is fundamentally different. The group of nominees is unusually talented. It has been the campaign of turnarounds. The NFL has been messy, with recent division champions falling away and longtime underperformers ascending in unison. During an normal season, a coach guiding the Denver Broncos to the top of the conference would make him the clear front-runner. But in this turbulent and entertaining year, he's facing five other exceptional candidates.

Here is how the ideal vote should be structured.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, His Team, 11-5

Voters for Coach of the Year selectors adore quarterbacks. They always have. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. If you fix a quarterback, you're well on your way home.

The Bears' head coach didn't merely fixed his young quarterback; he's freed him. Given a proper environment, Williams has been afforded the opportunity to display his rare talent. From Week 9, the Bears sit at number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a brief surge – it's prolonged dominance. With Johnson, the quarterback has become increasingly confident, less careless, and has eagerly submitted to the scheme instead of improvising. It is an attack designed solely in the coach's image: a bully-ball ground attack, a consistent helping of play-action passes and a creative aerial game that creates wide-open receivers all over the field. Williams has taken advantage. And when clear throws haven't been there, he's been capable to create big plays out of broken plays.

The coach arrived to the Bears with a specific offensive vision. Almost each bet – overhauling the trenches, highlighting the tight ends, turning Williams into a rhythm passer – has paid off. This is rare for a rookie head coach. And it's even more uncommon still for a leader who walked into the organization with the level of pressure Johnson did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the top name on the coaching carousel. But when it comes to selecting a leader, there are no sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has met expectations – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not only to be a scheme dork but the kind of leader that can breathe new life into an organization.

During a typical year, he would be the overwhelming favorite. But the current is not a normal year!

Where Johnson's case runs a bit unstuck is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense presently sit in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on takeaways, and takeaways are famously unreliable. Defensive minds can focus on ball disruption, but no one can ensure it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is real. He's not higher because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. If not for a few breaks of the ball, the Bears would be several victories behind. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the core is in place for sustained winning. However he comes up short here.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar situation to his counterpart. He's another rookie head coach who has orchestrated a swift turnaround. During the stretch run of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best all-around football of his professional life. And he's also overseen the transformation of a defensive unit that now ranks fifth in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

Even more impressively, Coen has excelled at the intangibles stuff, which was not a given after his initial press conference introduction and some of his preseason decisions.

The coach walked into Jacksonville with an uncommonly raw staff. In contrast to other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the perfect coaching cocktail of youth and experience, Coen trusted newbies. From the head coach himself to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That type of approach is exciting in theory, but often collapses in practice – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a new job on the fly. Yet Coen has managed to bring everyone and everything together.

After an initial strong start, there was a possibility that the season would go off the track. A midseason setback caused the Jags wobbling once more. That's usually when coaches panic and change too much. Coen didn't. Instead, he streamlined things. Jacksonville stopped pursuing home-run plays and started hunting sustainable ones. The coach refocused the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and asked Lawrence to use his legs more.

The outcomes are clear. The Jags have won multiple games in a row and will be the AFC's number three playoff seed. Coen receives the tiniest deduction in the rankings because he inherited a skilled roster, but he has proven he can maximize that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, Their Record

Each Coach of the Year argument has a pivotal moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback move.

Parting ways from a veteran, bringing in a different quarterback and pairing him with an innovative play-caller might have ended the campaign in the early weeks. Instead, it defined it. By the mid point of the season, the new QB was an MVP candidate. He has cooled off after that hot streak, dropping to 23rd in EPA per dropback over the second half of the season, placing him only one spot ahead of other QBs.

Still