🔗 Share this article

Typically, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor follows a straightforward script. It commonly functions as a type of mea culpa. We regret we misjudged your team in our preseason forecasts.

Theoretically, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the skipper who oversaw the largest improvement wins the award. In practice, it fuels an yearly discussion about expectations and whether we're actually rewarding excellent leadership or merely the most shocking shock.

But the latest competition is fundamentally unique. The group of contenders is exceptionally talented. It has been the campaign of resurgences. The league has been chaotic, with recent conference winners fading and longtime underperformers rising together. Under an ordinary year, a coach leading the his team to the top of the AFC would make him the stone-cold front-runner. Yet in such a chaotic and entertaining season, he's up against five other elite candidates.

This is how the hypothetical vote ought to be structured.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, 11-5

Voters for Coach of the Year selectors love QBs. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. Should you solve a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson hasn't just corrected his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. Given a proper ecosystem, the QB has been given the opportunity to showcase his otherworldly talent. From midseason onward, the Bears sit at fourth in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a lucky run – it's consistent dominance. Under Johnson, the quarterback has become more decisive, less careless, and has willingly surrendered to the gameplan instead of improvising. It is an offense constructed solely in the coach's vision: a physical ground attack, a heavy dose of play-action passes and a imaginative aerial game that springs wide-open receivers everywhere. The QB has thrived. And when clear throws weren't available, he's been capable to conjure magic from nothing.

The coach arrived to the Bears with a specific offensive blueprint. Almost every bet – rebuilding the trenches, utilizing the tight ends, turning Williams into a timing-based passer – has succeeded. That's uncommon for a rookie head coach. And it's rarer still for a leader who walked into the building with the kind of pressure he did. For two straight cycles, he was the top candidate on the head coaching market. But when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has lived up to the hype – and even surpassed them. He's proven not only to be a offensive genius but the kind of leader that can inject new life into an franchise.

During a ordinary year, Johnson would be the clear-cut choice. But the current is not a normal year!

Where Johnson's candidacy comes a bit unstuck is on defense. The Chicago defense presently sit in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are living on takeaways, and takeaways are famously unreliable. Defensive minds can emphasise creating turnovers, but nobody can guarantee it. He is on the list because the offensive production is sustainable. He's not higher because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. If not for a couple bounces of the ball, the team would be two victories behind. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the core is in place for sustained success. However Johnson falls short here.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar spot to his counterpart. He's another rookie leader who has engineered a dramatic resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest overall football of his career. And he's also overseen the overhaul of a defensive unit that now ranks number five in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

Even more impressively, he has mastered the leadership stuff, which wasn't a certainty after his initial public introduction and some of his preseason moves.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an uncommonly raw staff. In contrast to Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the ideal coaching cocktail of youth and experience, he hired newbies. From the leader on down to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are filled with rookies. That kind of setup is exciting on paper, but frequently fails in reality – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everybody is figuring out a their job in real-time. Yet he has pulled the entire group and all elements into sync.

Following an initial hot beginning, there was a risk that the season would veer off the track. A mid-year setback caused the Jags stumbling once more. That's typically when leaders overcorrect. Coen didn't. Instead, he streamlined the approach. The offense stopped pursuing home-run plays and started hunting consistent ones. The coach refocused the offense around his playmakers and the ground attack, and asked his QB to use his legs more.

The results are obvious. The Jags have won seven games consecutively and will be the AFC's No 3 seed. He gets the slightest knock in the standings because he inherited a skilled team, but he has proven he can maximize that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, 13-3

Each Strong of the Year argument has a defining decision. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB decision.

Moving on from a incumbent, bringing in a new signal-caller and partnering him with an innovative offensive coordinator might have ended the season in October. Instead, it made it. By the mid point of the season, the acquisition was an MVP candidate. He has regressed since that time, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per pass attempt over the second half of the schedule, placing him just a single place ahead of peers.

Still