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Usually, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor adheres to a straightforward script. It often serves as a form of mea culpa. We regret we underestimated your team in our pre-campaign forecasts.

On paper, it's a direct path: the coach who engineered the biggest resurgence wins the prize. However, it fuels an yearly discussion about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly honoring superior leadership or just the most shocking upset.

Yet the latest competition is profoundly different. The group of candidates is remarkably strong. It has been the campaign of turnarounds. The league has been messy, with reigning division winners declining and longtime also-rans ascending in unison. During an ordinary year, a coach guiding the Denver Broncos to the summit of the conference would make him the stone-cold favorite. Yet in this wild and thrilling season, he's facing five other elite coaches.

This is how the hypothetical vote ought to be structured.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, 11-5

Voters for Coach of the Year selectors are fascinated by QBs. They always have. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. If you transform a franchise QB, you're well on your way home.

The Bears' head coach not only fixed Caleb Williams; he's freed him. Within an ideal system, the QB has been afforded the opportunity to demonstrate his special talent. Since midseason onward, the Chicago offense sit at number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a hot streak – it's prolonged excellence. With Johnson, Williams has become more decisive, less reckless, and has eagerly surrendered to the gameplan rather than freelancing. It is an attack built solely in the coach's image: a bully-ball run game, a heavy helping of play-action and a imaginative aerial game that frees wide receiver targets all over the field. The QB has capitalized. And when openings haven't been available, he's been capable to create magic from nothing.

Johnson arrived to the Bears with a clear offensive philosophy. Almost every bet – overhauling the trenches, featuring the pass-catchers, transforming Williams into a rhythm thrower – has worked. That's uncommon for a first-year skipper. And it's even more uncommon still for a coach who walked into the building with the level of pressure he did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the hottest name on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are no sure things. Remarkably, he has met the hype – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a scheme dork but the kind of leader that can inject new life into an organization.

In a ordinary year, he would be the runaway choice. Yet the current isn't a typical season!

The area where his case runs slightly unstuck is on defense. The Bears presently rank 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on takeaways, and turnovers are famously inconsistent. Coaches can focus on creating turnovers, but nobody can ensure it. He is on the list because the offensive production is sustainable. He's ranked lower because variance is doing too much of the defense's heavy lifting. If not for a few bounces of the ball, the Bears would be two victories worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is in place for sustained success. However he comes up just short in this ranking.

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

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar spot to his counterpart. He's a fellow rookie leader who has orchestrated a rapid resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best overall football of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defensive unit that now ranks fifth in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more impressively, Coen has excelled at the intangibles 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 coaching staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded their staff with the perfect coaching blend of youth and veteran savvy, Coen bet on first-timers. Starting with the head coach himself to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with rookies. That type of setup is intriguing in theory, but frequently collapses in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everybody is figuring out a their job in real-time. Yet he has managed to bring everyone and everything into sync.

Following an initial strong beginning, there was a possibility that the campaign would go off the track. A mid-year setback caused the team stumbling once more. That's usually when leaders panic and change too much. He did not. Rather, he simplified the approach. Jacksonville stopped chasing home-run answers and started hunting sustainable ones. Coen refocused the offense around his playmakers and the running game, and encouraged Lawrence to use his legs more.

The outcomes are clear. The Jaguars have won multiple games in a row and will be the AFC's number three seed. He gets the tiniest deduction in the standings because he took over a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that roster.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3

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

Moving on from a incumbent, bringing in a new signal-caller and partnering him with an innovative offensive coordinator could have ended the season in October. Rather, it shaped it. By the middle point of the year, the acquisition was an MVP candidate. He has cooled off since that time, dropping to a lower rank in EPA per dropback over the second half of the season, placing him just a single spot ahead of other QBs.

Still