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Usually, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year trophy follows a simple script. It frequently serves as a type of mea culpa. We regret we underestimated your franchise in our pre-campaign predictions.

On paper, it's a direct path: the skipper who engineered the largest improvement receives the award. However, it fuels an yearly debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely honoring superior leadership or simply the most shocking shock.

Yet this year's field is distinctly unique. The pool of contenders is unusually deep. It has been the season of resurgences. The league has been chaotic, with recent conference winners declining and recent also-rans ascending together. Under an typical season, Sean Payton leading the his team to the top of the AFC would make him the clear front-runner. Yet in such a chaotic and thrilling year, he's up against multiple other exceptional candidates.

Below is how the projected vote could shake out.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, Their Record

Coach of the Year selectors adore signal-callers. They always have. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. Should you fix a franchise QB, you're well on your way to winning the award.

Ben Johnson not only fixed his young quarterback; he's freed him. Given a proper system, the QB has been given the opportunity to display his rare talent. From midseason onward, the Chicago offense sit at number four in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's prolonged excellence. Under his guidance, Williams has become more confident, less reckless, and has willingly submitted to the system instead of improvising. It is an attack designed solely in Johnson's vision: a physical run game, a consistent helping of play-action passes and a creative passing attack that creates wide receiver receivers everywhere. Williams has thrived. And when easy reads haven't been available, he's been able to spin magic out of broken plays.

Johnson arrived to Chicago with a defined offensive blueprint. Virtually every bet – rebuilding the trenches, featuring the pass-catchers, turning the QB into a rhythm thrower – has paid off. That's uncommon for a rookie head coach. And it's even more uncommon yet for a coach who entered the organization with the level of pressure he did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the hottest name on the coaching market. However when it comes to selecting a leader, there are no sure things. Somehow, he has lived up to expectations – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a offensive wizard but the kind of leader that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.

During a ordinary season, Johnson would be the runaway choice. Yet this is not a typical season!

The area where Johnson's case runs slightly unstuck is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense presently sit in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on turnovers, and takeaways are famously unreliable. Coaches can focus on ball disruption, but no one can ensure it. Johnson is on the list because the offensive production is legitimate. He's not higher because luck is doing too much of the defense's heavy lifting. If not for a few breaks of the ball, the Bears would be two wins behind. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the foundation is established for long-term success. However Johnson falls short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar situation to Johnson. He's a fellow first-time head coach who has engineered a dramatic resurgence. During the stretch run of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest all-around football of his professional life. And he's also overseen the remaking of a defense that now ranks fifth in the league in EPA per play.

Even more notably, Coen has excelled at the intangibles stuff, which wasn't a certainty following his early press conference introduction and some of his offseason decisions.

Coen took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally inexperienced coaching staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the ideal coaching blend of youth and experience, Coen bet on first-timers. From the head coach himself to assistants to position coaches, the Jags are filled with rookies. That type of setup is intriguing in theory, but frequently fails in practice – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everyone is learning a new job in real-time. But he has managed to bring everyone and everything together.

Following an initial strong start, there was a possibility that the season would veer off the track. A midseason setback caused the Jags stumbling again. That's usually when leaders panic and change too much. He did not. Instead, he streamlined the approach. Jacksonville stopped chasing explosive answers and started hunting sustainable ones. Coen refocused the attack around key players and the ground attack, and encouraged his QB to use his mobility more.

The outcomes are obvious. The Jaguars have won seven games consecutively and will be the AFC's number three playoff seed. He gets the slightest deduction in the rankings because he took over a skilled team, but he has proven he can maximize that roster.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record

Each Coach of the Year argument has a hinge decision. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB choice.

Parting ways from a veteran, bringing in a different quarterback and pairing him with an innovative play-caller could have ended the campaign in the early weeks. Rather, it shaped it. Through the middle point of the year, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player candidate. He has regressed since that hot streak, slipping to 23rd in efficiency per dropback over the second half of the schedule, putting him only a single spot ahead of peers.

Still