🔗 Share this article

Ordinarily, the NFL's Head Coach of the Year award follows a straightforward script. It often serves as a type of apology. Our apologies we underestimated your squad in our pre-campaign forecasts.

Theoretically, it's a clear-cut path: the coach who engineered the largest improvement wins the prize. In practice, it fuels an yearly argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely honoring excellent coaching or merely the biggest surprise.

Yet the current competition is fundamentally unique. The list of contenders is unusually strong. It has been the season of resurgences. The NFL has been messy, with recent conference champions falling away and recent underperformers rising collectively. In an normal season, a coach leading the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the clear favorite. But in such a chaotic and fun season, he's competing with five other outstanding coaches.

This is how the hypothetical vote could shake out.

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

Voters for Coach of the Year voters are fascinated by QBs. They always have. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. Should you solve a quarterback, you're halfway home.

The Bears' head coach hasn't just fixed Caleb Williams; he's freed him. In the right environment, the QB has been given the opportunity to demonstrate his special talent. From Week 9, the Chicago offense rank number four in offensive EPA per play. That's not a brief surge – it's prolonged performance. Under Johnson, Williams has become more confident, less reckless, and has eagerly surrendered to the system instead of going rogue. It is an attack designed solely in the coach's vision: a physical run game, a heavy dose of play-action and a creative passing attack that springs wide receiver targets consistently. Williams has thrived. And when openings weren't there, he's been capable to conjure big plays out of nothing.

Johnson arrived to Chicago with a specific offensive blueprint. Almost every decision – rebuilding the trenches, highlighting the pass-catchers, transforming Williams into a timing-based thrower – has worked. This is uncommon for a first-year skipper. And it's rarer still for a leader who entered the building with the kind of hype Johnson did. For two straight cycles, he was the most sought-after candidate on the head coaching carousel. But when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero sure things. Somehow, he has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not just to be a offensive wizard but the kind of leader that can inject new life into an franchise.

In a ordinary season, he would be the runaway choice. But this isn't a normal season!

Where his case comes slightly unstuck is on defense. The Bears currently sit in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are living on takeaways, and takeaways are notoriously unreliable. Coaches can emphasise ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. He is on the list because the offense is sustainable. He's ranked lower because variance is doing an outsized share of the defensive work. With a few breaks of the ball, the team would be two victories worse off. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the core is in place for sustained winning. But he falls just short in this ranking.

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

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar spot to Johnson. He's another rookie head coach who has masterminded a rapid resurgence. Over the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the most complete all-around football of his career. And he's also overseen the remaking of a defense that now sits at number five in the league in EPA per play.

What's more impressively, he has mastered the off-field stuff, which was not a given after his early public introduction and some of his offseason decisions.

Coen walked into Jacksonville with an exceptionally raw coaching staff. Unlike other coaches, who packed their staff with the ideal staff mix of new ideas and experience, Coen hired newbies. Starting with the leader himself to assistants to position coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with rookies. That type of approach is exciting in theory, but often fails in reality – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everybody is figuring out a new job on the fly. Yet he has managed to bring everyone and everything into sync.

After an initial hot start, there was a possibility that the season would go off the rails. A mid-year setback had the Jags wobbling again. That's usually when coaches panic and change too much. Coen didn't. Instead, he streamlined things. Jacksonville stopped pursuing explosive answers and started seeking sustainable ones. Coen recentered the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and encouraged Lawrence to use his mobility more.

The results are obvious. The Jags have won seven games in a row and will be the AFC's number three seed. He receives the tiniest knock in the standings because he took over a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that roster.

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

Every Strong of the Year argument has a pivotal moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB move.

Parting ways from a incumbent, signing a new quarterback and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator could have derailed the campaign in the early weeks. Instead, it shaped it. By the mid point of the year, the acquisition was an MVP front-runner. He has cooled off since that hot streak, dropping to a lower rank in EPA per pass attempt over the second half of the schedule, putting him only a single place ahead of other QBs.

Still