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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Coach of the Year award follows a straightforward script. It commonly functions as a form of mea culpa. Our apologies we got wrong your team in our preseason projections.

On paper, it's a clear-cut line: the skipper who oversaw the biggest turnaround wins the award. In reality, it creates an annual debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly rewarding excellent leadership or merely the most shocking shock.

But the latest race is fundamentally different. The group of contenders is unusually strong. It has been the year of resurgences. The NFL has been messy, with recent division champions falling away and longtime strugglers improving in unison. In an typical season, a coach leading the his team to the top of the AFC would make him the clear favorite. Yet in such a turbulent and thrilling year, he's facing multiple other exceptional candidates.

This is how the projected vote ought to look.

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

Voters for Coach of the Year voters love QBs. History shows this. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. When you fix a quarterback, you're well on your way home.

The Bears' head coach not only corrected his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. Given a proper system, Williams has been given the chance to demonstrate his otherworldly ability. Since Week 9, the Bears rank number four in offensive EPA per play. That's not a brief surge – it's consistent excellence. With his guidance, Williams has become increasingly decisive, far less careless, and has willingly submitted to the scheme rather than improvising. It is an attack designed entirely in Johnson's vision: a bully-ball ground attack, a heavy dose of play-action and a imaginative passing attack that springs wide-open targets consistently. Williams has capitalized. And when openings haven't been there, he's been capable to create magic out of broken plays.

The coach arrived to the Bears with a defined offensive blueprint. Almost every gamble – rebuilding the trenches, utilizing the pass-catchers, transforming Williams into a timing-based passer – has worked. That's uncommon for a first-year skipper. And it's rarer yet for a coach who entered the organization with the level of pressure Johnson did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the most sought-after candidate on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are zero sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has lived up to the hype – and even surpassed them. He's proven not only to be a scheme dork but the type of leader that can breathe new life into an franchise.

In a normal year, Johnson would be the runaway choice. Yet this is not a typical year!

The area where his candidacy runs a bit into trouble is on defense. The Chicago defense currently sit in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are living on takeaways, and turnovers are notoriously fickle. Defensive minds can focus on ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee it. He is on the list because the offense is sustainable. He's ranked lower because variance is doing too much of the defense's work. With a few bounces of the ball, the team would be several victories behind. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the foundation is in place for long-term success. But Johnson falls short in this ranking.

4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

Coen is in a comparable position to Johnson. He's another rookie head coach who has masterminded a swift resurgence. During the crucial final weeks of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest overall football of his career. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defensive unit that now ranks fifth in the NFL in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more notably, Coen has excelled at the off-field stuff, which wasn't a guarantee following his early press conference introduction and some of his offseason moves.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an uncommonly raw staff. In contrast to Johnson, who packed themselves with the perfect coaching cocktail of youth and experience, Coen bet on newbies. Starting with the leader on down to assistants to position coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with first-timers. That type of setup is intriguing in theory, but frequently fails in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everyone is learning a new job in real-time. But Coen has pulled the entire group and all elements into sync.

After an initial hot start, there was a chance that the season would veer off the rails. A mid-year collapse had the team wobbling once more. That's usually when leaders overcorrect. Coen did not. Instead, he streamlined the approach. The offense stopped pursuing home-run answers and started seeking sustainable ones. Coen refocused the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and encouraged his QB to use his mobility more.

The results are evident. The Jaguars have won seven games consecutively and will be the conference's number three seed. He receives the slightest deduction in the rankings because he took over a skilled team, but he has proven he can get the most out of that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, 13-3

Every Coach of the Year case has a defining decision. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB choice.

Moving on from a veteran, bringing in a new quarterback and pairing him with an new offensive coordinator could have ended the season in the early weeks. Instead, it defined it. By the mid point of the year, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player front-runner. He has fallen away after that hot streak, slipping to a lower rank in EPA per dropback over the second half of the season, placing him only one place ahead of other QBs.

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