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Typically, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year honor follows a simple pattern. It commonly serves as a form of mea culpa. Our apologies we misjudged your squad in our pre-campaign predictions.

On paper, it's a direct line: the coach who oversaw the biggest improvement wins the award. However, it fuels an annual discussion about expectations and whether we're genuinely honoring superior coaching or just the greatest upset.

But this year's race is fundamentally different. The list of contenders is unusually strong. It has been the campaign of resurgences. The NFL has been messy, with reigning conference winners declining and longtime underperformers ascending collectively. Under an typical year, a coach guiding the his team to the top of the conference would make him the overwhelming front-runner. Yet in this wild and thrilling season, he's competing with multiple other exceptional candidates.

This is how the ideal ballot could be structured.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, Chicago Bears, Their Record

Voters for Coach of the Year voters adore QBs. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. Should you fix a quarterback, you're well on your way to winning the award.

Ben Johnson didn't merely fixed his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. Given a proper environment, the QB has been given the opportunity to showcase his rare ability. Since Week 9, the Bears sit at fourth in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's consistent excellence. Under his guidance, the quarterback has become more decisive, less careless, and has eagerly surrendered to the gameplan rather than freelancing. It is an attack built entirely in Johnson's image: a bully-ball run game, a steady dose of play-action and a innovative passing attack that frees wide-open targets consistently. Williams has thrived. And when clear throws haven't been available, he's been able to create big plays out of broken plays.

The coach came to Chicago with a clear offensive philosophy. Virtually each bet – rebuilding the offensive line, featuring the tight ends, turning Williams into a timing-based thrower – has succeeded. That's rare for a first-year skipper. And it's even more uncommon yet for a coach who entered the organization with the level of expectations he did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the hottest candidate on the coaching market. However when it comes to hiring a leader, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has met the hype – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a scheme dork but the type of culture builder that can inject new life into an franchise.

In a ordinary season, Johnson would be the clear-cut favorite. Yet the current isn't a typical year!

The area where his case comes a bit unstuck is on the defensive side. The Bears currently sit 25th in defensive efficiency. They are relying on turnovers, and takeaways are notoriously inconsistent. Defensive minds can focus on creating turnovers, but no one can ensure it. He is on the ballot because the offense is real. He's ranked lower because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's heavy lifting. If not for a few breaks of the ball, the team would be two wins behind. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is in place for long-term success. But Johnson comes up just short here.

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

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable spot to his counterpart. He's a fellow first-time leader who has engineered a rapid turnaround. During the stretch run of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the most complete all-around football of his career. And he's also spearheaded the transformation of a defensive unit that now ranks number five in the NFL in EPA per play.

What's more impressively, Coen has mastered the off-field stuff, which wasn't a certainty following his initial press conference introduction and some of his preseason decisions.

Coen walked into the Jaguars with an uncommonly inexperienced coaching staff. Unlike Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the perfect staff blend of youth and experience, he hired newbies. Starting with the leader himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with rookies. That type of setup is exciting in theory, but frequently fails in practice – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everybody is learning a their job in real-time. Yet Coen has managed to bring everyone and everything together.

After an initial hot start, there was a chance that the campaign would go off the rails. A mid-year collapse caused the Jags wobbling again. That's usually when coaches panic and change too much. He didn't. Rather, he simplified things. The offense stopped chasing home-run answers and started hunting sustainable ones. Coen refocused the attack around his playmakers and the running game, and asked his QB to use his legs more.

The results are obvious. The Jaguars have won multiple games in a row and will be the AFC's No 3 seed. He gets the tiniest deduction in the standings because he took over a skilled roster, but he has proven he can get the most out of that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, 13-3

Every Strong of the Year case has a hinge moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his quarterback move.

Parting ways from a incumbent, signing a new quarterback and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator might have ended the season in the early weeks. Rather, it shaped it. By the middle point of the season, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player front-runner. He has cooled off since that hot streak, slipping to 23rd in EPA per pass attempt over the second half of the schedule, putting him only one spot ahead of peers.

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