🔗 Share this article

Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year award follows a straightforward script. It commonly serves as a kind of mea culpa. Sorry we misjudged your franchise in our pre-campaign forecasts.

On paper, it's a direct line: the coach who orchestrated the most dramatic improvement receives the award. However, it creates an yearly debate about expectations and whether we're actually honoring excellent coaching or merely the greatest surprise.

However the latest competition is profoundly different. The group of contenders is exceptionally strong. It has been the campaign of resurgences. The league has been messy, with reigning conference champions declining and longtime strugglers rising together. During an typical season, a coach guiding the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the clear favorite. Yet in such a turbulent and thrilling season, he's competing with five other elite candidates.

This is how the ideal ballot ought to be structured.

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

Coach of the Year selectors adore quarterbacks. History shows this. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. When you fix a quarterback, you're halfway home.

The Bears' head coach didn't merely fixed Caleb Williams; he's freed him. Given a proper environment, Williams has been afforded the chance to demonstrate his special talent. From midseason onward, the Chicago offense rank number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a lucky run – it's sustained performance. With his guidance, the quarterback has become more decisive, less reckless, and has eagerly surrendered to the system instead of improvising. It is an offense constructed solely in Johnson's image: a physical run game, a consistent dose of play-action passes and a imaginative aerial game that frees wide receiver targets consistently. Williams has capitalized. And when clear throws haven't been there, he's been capable to conjure big plays from broken plays.

The coach arrived to the Bears with a specific offensive philosophy. Almost each gamble – overhauling the offensive line, highlighting the tight ends, transforming Williams into a timing-based passer – has worked. This is uncommon for a first-year skipper. And it's even more uncommon still 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 market. But when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's proven not only to be a offensive wizard but the type of leader that can breathe new life into an franchise.

In a ordinary year, Johnson would be the overwhelming favorite. But this isn't a typical campaign!

The area where his candidacy runs a bit into trouble is on the defensive side. The Bears presently rank 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on takeaways, and turnovers are famously unreliable. Coaches can focus on creating turnovers, but no one can ensure it. Johnson is on the list because the offensive production is legitimate. He's ranked lower because variance is doing too much of the defensive heavy lifting. If not for a couple bounces of the ball, the team would be two wins worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is established for sustained success. However Johnson comes up short here.

4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar situation to Johnson. He's a fellow rookie head coach who has masterminded a dramatic resurgence. Over the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the most complete all-around ball of his career. And he's also overseen the remaking of a defense that now sits at number five in the NFL in Expected Points Added per play.

Even more notably, he has excelled at the leadership stuff, which wasn't a guarantee following his early public introduction and some of his offseason decisions.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an exceptionally raw coaching staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the ideal coaching mix of new ideas and veteran savvy, Coen bet on newbies. From the leader himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are filled with first-timers. That kind of setup is intriguing in theory, but frequently fails in practice – with other teams are a warning – because everybody is learning a their job in real-time. Yet Coen has managed to bring everyone and everything into sync.

Following an early strong start, there was a possibility that the campaign would go off the rails. A midseason setback caused the Jags stumbling once more. That's typically when coaches overcorrect. He did not. Instead, he streamlined the approach. The offense stopped pursuing home-run answers and started hunting reliable ones. The coach refocused the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and asked Lawrence to use his legs more often.

The results are evident. The Jags have won seven games in a row and will be the AFC's number three playoff seed. He gets the slightest knock in the standings because he inherited a talented team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, 13-3

Each Coach of the Year argument has a defining moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his quarterback decision.

Moving on from a veteran, bringing in a different signal-caller and partnering him with an new play-caller might have ended the season in October. Rather, it defined it. By the mid point of the season, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has cooled off since that time, dropping to 23rd in EPA per dropback over the second half of the schedule, placing him only a single place ahead of peers.

Still