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Usually, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year trophy adheres to a straightforward pattern. It commonly functions as a kind of mea culpa. We regret we underestimated your team in our pre-campaign forecasts.

On paper, it's a clear-cut path: the coach who orchestrated the most dramatic resurgence wins the prize. In reality, it fuels an annual debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly rewarding excellent coaching or merely the biggest surprise.

Yet the latest field is fundamentally different. The list of candidates is exceptionally strong. It has been the campaign of turnarounds. The NFL has been chaotic, with recent division winners fading and longtime underperformers rising in unison. In an typical year, a coach guiding the his team to the summit of the conference would make him the clear favorite. Yet in such a chaotic and entertaining season, he's facing five other exceptional candidates.

Below is how the ideal vote could be structured.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, Their Record

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

The Bears' head coach not only corrected Caleb Williams; he's unleashed him. Within an ideal environment, Williams has been afforded the opportunity to display his special talent. From Week 9, the Chicago offense sit at number four in offensive EPA per play. That's not a brief surge – it's sustained performance. Under Johnson, the quarterback has become more decisive, far less reckless, and has eagerly submitted to the system rather than improvising. It is an offense designed entirely in Johnson's vision: a bully-ball ground attack, a steady helping of play-action passes and a creative passing attack that creates wide receiver targets everywhere. Williams has thrived. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been capable to conjure big plays from nothing.

The coach came to the Bears with a specific offensive vision. Almost each gamble – rebuilding the trenches, utilizing the tight ends, transforming Williams into a rhythm thrower – has succeeded. This is rare for a rookie head coach. And it's even more uncommon yet for a coach who walked into the organization with the kind of hype he did. For two straight cycles, he was the hottest name on the coaching carousel. However when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has met the hype – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not only to be a offensive dork but the type of leader that can breathe new life into an franchise.

During a typical season, he would be the clear-cut choice. But the current isn't a normal season!

Where his candidacy comes slightly into trouble is on the defensive side. The Bears currently rank in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are living on takeaways, and takeaways are famously fickle. Coaches can focus on ball disruption, but nobody can ensure it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offense is legitimate. He's ranked lower because variance is doing too much of the defensive work. With a few bounces of the ball, the team would be several victories worse off. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the foundation is in place for long-term success. However Johnson falls just short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

Coen is in a comparable situation to his counterpart. He's another rookie head coach who has masterminded a rapid turnaround. During the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best overall ball of his career. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defense that now ranks fifth in the NFL in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more notably, Coen has excelled at the intangibles aspects, which wasn't a given following his early press conference appearances and some of his preseason decisions.

Coen walked into the Jaguars with an uncommonly raw coaching staff. In contrast to Johnson, who packed their staff with the ideal staff cocktail of youth and experience, he hired newbies. From the head coach himself to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That kind of setup is intriguing on paper, but often fails in practice – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everybody is figuring out a their job in real-time. But he has pulled the entire group and all elements together.

After an initial hot start, there was a risk that the campaign would veer off the rails. A mid-year setback caused the Jags stumbling once more. That's usually when coaches overcorrect. Coen didn't. Rather, he streamlined things. Jacksonville stopped pursuing explosive plays and started hunting reliable ones. The coach recentered the offense around key players and the ground attack, and asked Lawrence to use his legs more.

The outcomes are evident. The Jags have won seven games in a row and will be the AFC's No 3 seed. Coen receives the slightest deduction in the standings because he took over a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3

Each Coach of the Year narrative has a defining moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB choice.

Moving on from a veteran, bringing in a new signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator could have derailed the campaign in the early weeks. Instead, it made it. By the middle point of the year, the acquisition was an MVP contender. He has fallen away since that time, slipping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the schedule, placing him just a single place ahead of other QBs.

Still