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Usually, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year honor adheres to a simple pattern. It frequently serves as a form of mea culpa. We regret we misjudged your squad in our pre-campaign forecasts.

Theoretically, it's a direct line: the coach who engineered the most dramatic improvement receives the award. In reality, it fuels an annual argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely honoring superior leadership or merely the greatest upset.

But the current competition is profoundly different. The group of nominees is remarkably talented. It has been the campaign of resurgences. The NFL has been messy, with reigning conference winners fading and recent also-rans ascending together. In an normal season, a coach leading the Denver Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the clear front-runner. Yet in such a chaotic and entertaining year, he's facing several other outstanding coaches.

This is how the hypothetical vote ought to shake out.

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

Voters for Coach of the Year selectors love signal-callers. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. When you solve a franchise QB, you're well on your way to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach didn't merely corrected his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. In the right system, the QB has been afforded the chance to showcase his otherworldly talent. From Week 9, the Bears sit at number four in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a hot streak – it's prolonged dominance. Under his guidance, Williams has become more decisive, less careless, and has eagerly surrendered to the gameplan rather than freelancing. It is an attack constructed solely in Johnson's image: a bully-ball ground attack, a steady dose of play-action passes and a creative aerial game that creates wide-open targets consistently. The QB has capitalized. And when easy reads weren't available, he's been capable to conjure magic from broken plays.

The coach arrived to the Bears with a specific offensive blueprint. Virtually each decision – overhauling the offensive line, highlighting the tight ends, transforming Williams into a rhythm passer – has paid off. That's rare for a rookie skipper. And it's even more uncommon yet for a coach who entered the building with the kind of hype Johnson did. For two straight cycles, he was the hottest candidate on the coaching market. However when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has met expectations – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not only to be a scheme wizard but the kind of culture builder that can breathe fresh energy into an organization.

In a typical year, he would be the clear-cut choice. Yet this is not a typical year!

Where Johnson's candidacy comes slightly unstuck is on the defensive side. The Bears presently sit 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on turnovers, and takeaways are notoriously fickle. Coaches can focus on ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offense is real. He's ranked lower because variance is doing too much of the defensive work. If not for a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be several wins behind. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is in place for sustained success. But Johnson falls short here.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable position to his counterpart. He's a fellow rookie head coach who has engineered a rapid resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best all-around ball of his career. And he's also spearheaded the remaking of a defense that now sits at number five in the NFL in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more impressively, Coen has mastered the off-field stuff, which was not a guarantee after his early press conference appearances and some of his preseason decisions.

The coach took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally raw coaching staff. In contrast to Johnson, who surrounded themselves with the ideal coaching cocktail of new ideas and veteran savvy, Coen hired newbies. From the head coach himself to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with rookies. That kind of setup is exciting on paper, but frequently fails in reality – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everybody is learning a their job on the fly. But he has pulled the entire group and all elements together.

After an early strong start, there was a risk that the season would veer off the track. A mid-year setback caused the Jags stumbling again. That's typically when coaches panic and change too much. He didn't. Rather, he simplified the approach. The offense stopped pursuing explosive plays and started seeking reliable ones. Coen recentered the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and encouraged his QB to use his mobility more.

The results are obvious. The Jags have won multiple games consecutively and will be the conference's No 3 playoff seed. Coen gets the tiniest deduction in the rankings because he took over a skilled roster, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that talent.

3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record

Every Strong of the Year case has a defining moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB move.

Parting ways from a veteran, bringing in a new quarterback and pairing him with an new offensive coordinator could have derailed the season in the early weeks. Instead, it shaped it. By the mid point of the year, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has fallen away since that hot streak, dropping to 23rd in EPA per pass attempt over the latter part of the season, placing him just one place ahead of peers.

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