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Usually, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year award follows a simple formula. It frequently acts as a form of mea culpa. Our apologies we underestimated your team in our preseason predictions.

On paper, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the skipper who orchestrated the most dramatic turnaround wins the award. However, it creates an yearly debate about expectations and whether we're truly honoring superior coaching or just the biggest shock.

But this year's field is distinctly unique. The group of nominees is remarkably strong. It has been the campaign of comebacks. The league has been chaotic, with recent division winners fading and recent strugglers rising in unison. During an normal year, a coach leading the his team to the summit of the conference would make him the stone-cold favorite. But in this turbulent and fun season, he's facing five other elite coaches.

This is how the ideal vote should look.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, Their Record

Voters for Coach of the Year voters love QBs. History shows this. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. When you transform a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson didn't merely corrected his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. In the right environment, Williams has been given the chance to display his special ability. Since Week 9, the Bears sit at number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a brief surge – it's prolonged excellence. Under his guidance, the quarterback has become more confident, less careless, and has willingly surrendered to the gameplan rather than going rogue. It is an offense constructed solely in the coach's vision: a bully-ball ground attack, a heavy helping of play-action and a creative aerial game that springs wide receiver targets all over the field. The QB has capitalized. And when easy reads weren't there, he's been capable to create big plays out of nothing.

Johnson came to the Bears with a clear offensive philosophy. Almost each decision – rebuilding the trenches, utilizing the pass-catchers, turning the QB into a rhythm passer – has paid off. This is rare for a rookie skipper. And it's even more uncommon still for a leader who entered the organization with the kind of pressure Johnson did. For two straight cycles, he was the top candidate on the coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a leader, there are zero sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has lived up to expectations – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not only to be a scheme genius but the type of leader that can inject new life into an franchise.

During a normal year, Johnson would be the overwhelming choice. But the current is not a typical campaign!

The area where his candidacy comes slightly unstuck 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. Defensive minds can focus on creating turnovers, but no one can guarantee it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offense is legitimate. He's not higher because variance is doing too much of the defense's heavy lifting. If not for a couple bounces of the ball, the Bears would be several wins worse off. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the foundation is established for long-term success. But Johnson falls just short here.

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

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar spot to his counterpart. He's a fellow rookie head coach who has orchestrated a swift resurgence. Over the stretch run of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best overall ball of his career. And he's also overseen the overhaul of a defense that now ranks number five in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more impressively, he has nailed the intangibles aspects, which wasn't a certainty after his initial press conference introduction and some of his offseason decisions.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an uncommonly inexperienced coaching staff. In contrast to other coaches, who packed themselves with the perfect coaching mix of new ideas and veteran savvy, Coen trusted first-timers. Starting with the leader himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That type of approach is intriguing on paper, but frequently collapses in reality – with other teams are a warning – because everybody is learning a their job in real-time. Yet he has pulled the entire group and all elements into sync.

After an initial strong start, there was a possibility that the season would veer off the rails. A midseason setback had the team stumbling again. That's typically when leaders panic and change too much. He did not. Instead, he streamlined the approach. The offense stopped pursuing explosive answers and started hunting sustainable ones. Coen recentered the attack around key players and the running game, and asked Lawrence to use his legs more often.

The results are evident. The Jaguars have won multiple games consecutively and will be the AFC's No 3 playoff seed. Coen receives the slightest knock in the rankings because he took over a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that roster.

3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3

Each Coach of the Year narrative has a hinge moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB move.

Moving on from a veteran, bringing in a different quarterback and partnering him with an new offensive coordinator might have derailed the season in October. Rather, it defined it. Through the middle point of the year, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has fallen away since that hot streak, dropping to 23rd in efficiency per dropback over the second half of the season, placing him only a single spot ahead of peers.

Still