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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year award follows a straightforward pattern. It commonly acts as a form of mea culpa. We regret we got wrong your franchise in our pre-campaign predictions.

Theoretically, it's a direct trajectory: the coach who oversaw the largest improvement receives the award. However, it fuels an annual argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely rewarding excellent coaching or simply the greatest surprise.

But the current field is distinctly unique. The group of candidates is unusually talented. It has been the year of turnarounds. The league has been chaotic, with recent conference champions falling away and recent underperformers rising collectively. During an ordinary season, Sean Payton leading the his team to the top of the AFC would make him the overwhelming favorite. But in such a wild and fun year, he's facing five other elite candidates.

Here is how the hypothetical ballot ought to be structured.

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

Coach of the Year selectors love signal-callers. They always have. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. If you fix a franchise QB, you're well on your way to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach didn't merely corrected Caleb Williams; he's unlocked him. Within an ideal ecosystem, Williams has been given the opportunity to showcase his special talent. From Week 9, the Chicago offense sit at number four in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's prolonged performance. With Johnson, Williams has become more decisive, less reckless, and has willingly surrendered to the system rather than going rogue. It is an offense constructed solely in the coach's image: a bully-ball run game, a heavy helping of play-action and a innovative passing attack that creates wide-open targets all over the field. Williams has thrived. And when easy reads haven't been available, he's been capable to spin big plays from nothing.

The coach arrived to Chicago with a clear offensive blueprint. Almost each gamble – overhauling the trenches, featuring the tight ends, turning the QB into a rhythm thrower – has worked. That's uncommon for a first-year skipper. And it's even more uncommon still for a leader who walked into the building with the kind of hype Johnson did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the hottest candidate on the coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a leader, there are zero guarantees. Somehow, Johnson has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's proven not only to be a scheme wizard but the type of leader that can breathe fresh energy into an organization.

During a typical season, Johnson would be the runaway favorite. But the current is not a normal season!

Where his candidacy comes slightly into trouble is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense presently rank in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on takeaways, and turnovers are famously inconsistent. Coaches can emphasise ball disruption, but nobody can ensure it. He is on the list because the offense is sustainable. He's ranked lower because luck is doing too much of the defense's heavy lifting. With a few bounces of the ball, the team would be two victories behind. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is established for long-term success. However Johnson comes up short in this ranking.

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

Coen is in a comparable situation to Johnson. He's a fellow first-time leader who has engineered a swift turnaround. During the crucial final weeks of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the most complete all-around football of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the transformation of a defensive unit that now sits at number five in the league in EPA per play.

What's more notably, he has excelled at the intangibles aspects, which wasn't a certainty following his early public introduction and some of his offseason decisions.

The coach took over Jacksonville with an uncommonly raw coaching staff. In contrast to Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the ideal staff mix of youth and experience, he hired newbies. Starting with the head coach on down to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with first-timers. That kind of approach is intriguing on paper, but often collapses in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everybody is learning a their job on the fly. But Coen has pulled the entire group and all elements into sync.

After an initial strong beginning, there was a possibility that the campaign would veer off the track. A midseason setback had the team wobbling again. That's usually when coaches overcorrect. He didn't. Instead, he streamlined the approach. The offense stopped chasing home-run answers and started hunting sustainable ones. The coach recentered the offense around his playmakers and the running game, and asked his QB to use his legs more often.

The outcomes are evident. The Jags have won seven games in a row and will be the AFC's No 3 playoff seed. He gets the tiniest knock in the rankings because he took over a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that roster.

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

Every Strong of the Year narrative has a pivotal decision. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB move.

Parting ways from a incumbent, bringing in a different quarterback and pairing him with an innovative play-caller could have ended the season in the early weeks. Rather, it made it. By the middle point of the season, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has cooled off after that hot streak, slipping to 23rd in EPA per dropback over the second half of the season, putting him just a single place ahead of other QBs.

Still