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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Coach of the Year award follows a straightforward pattern. It often functions as a form of mea culpa. Our apologies we got wrong your franchise in our preseason predictions.

Theoretically, it's a direct trajectory: the skipper who orchestrated the biggest improvement is handed the award. However, it creates an yearly argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly rewarding superior coaching or merely the greatest upset.

Yet the latest field is profoundly different. The list of nominees is exceptionally talented. It has been the campaign of resurgences. The league has been messy, with reigning conference champions falling away and recent underperformers improving collectively. During an ordinary year, a coach leading the his team to the top of the AFC would make him the clear favorite. Yet in such a wild and entertaining year, he's up against five other elite coaches.

Here is how the projected vote ought to look.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, Their Record

Coach of the Year voters are fascinated by quarterbacks. They always have. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. If you transform a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson hasn't just corrected his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. Within an ideal ecosystem, Williams has been afforded the opportunity to showcase his special talent. Since Week 9, the Chicago offense sit at number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a lucky run – it's prolonged performance. With his guidance, Williams has become more confident, less reckless, and has willingly surrendered to the system rather than going rogue. It is an attack built entirely in Johnson's image: a physical run game, a consistent dose of play-action passes and a creative passing attack that springs wide-open targets consistently. The QB has thrived. And when openings weren't available, he's been capable to conjure big plays out of nothing.

The coach came to Chicago with a defined offensive blueprint. Almost every gamble – overhauling the trenches, highlighting the tight ends, turning the QB into a timing-based thrower – has succeeded. That's uncommon for a first-year head coach. And it's even more uncommon still for a coach who walked into the organization with the level of pressure Johnson did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the hottest name on the head coaching market. But when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero sure things. Remarkably, he has lived up to the hype – and even exceeded them. He's proven not just to be a offensive genius but the kind of leader that can breathe fresh energy into an organization.

During a ordinary year, Johnson would be the clear-cut choice. But this isn't a typical year!

The area where Johnson's candidacy runs slightly into trouble is on defense. The Bears currently rank 25th in defensive success rate. They are surviving on turnovers, and takeaways are famously fickle. Coaches can emphasise ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offensive production is real. He's not higher because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. With a few bounces of the ball, the Bears would be two victories worse off. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the foundation is established for sustained winning. But Johnson falls short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, Their Record

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable position to Johnson. He's a fellow rookie leader who has masterminded a dramatic resurgence. Over the stretch run of the season, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest overall football of his career. And he's also overseen the overhaul of a defensive unit that now ranks fifth in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

Even more impressively, he has mastered the off-field stuff, which was not a certainty following his early press conference appearances and some of his preseason moves.

The coach walked into the Jaguars with an exceptionally raw coaching staff. In contrast to other coaches, who packed themselves with the ideal staff mix of new ideas and experience, he trusted first-timers. From the head coach on down to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are filled with rookies. That type of setup is exciting in theory, but often fails in practice – with other teams are a warning – because everyone is figuring out a new job in real-time. But Coen has pulled the entire group and all elements into sync.

Following an initial strong beginning, there was a chance that the campaign would go off the track. A mid-year setback had the Jags wobbling once more. That's usually when leaders overcorrect. Coen didn't. Rather, he simplified the approach. The offense stopped pursuing home-run answers and started hunting sustainable ones. Coen recentered the attack around key players and the ground attack, and encouraged Lawrence to use his legs more often.

The outcomes are obvious. The Jaguars have won multiple games consecutively and will be the AFC's number three playoff seed. Coen gets the tiniest knock in the standings because he took over a talented roster, but he has proven he can get the most out of that roster.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, Their Record

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

Moving on from a incumbent, bringing in a new signal-caller and partnering him with an innovative play-caller might have derailed the campaign in the early weeks. Instead, it defined it. By the mid point of the season, the new QB was an MVP front-runner. He has regressed after that time, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per pass attempt over the second half of the season, placing him just a single spot ahead of peers.

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