🔗 Share this article

Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year honor follows a simple script. It often functions as a kind of mea culpa. We regret we misjudged your franchise in our pre-campaign forecasts.

In theory, it's a direct path: the coach who engineered the largest turnaround is handed the prize. In practice, it fuels an yearly argument about expectations and whether we're genuinely rewarding excellent leadership or merely the most shocking shock.

Yet this year's race is distinctly unique. The list of candidates is remarkably talented. It has been the campaign of comebacks. The NFL has been messy, with recent conference champions declining and recent underperformers improving collectively. Under an normal season, Sean Payton guiding the Denver Broncos to the summit of the AFC would make him the stone-cold favorite. Yet in this chaotic and entertaining season, he's competing with multiple other outstanding candidates.

Below is how the projected ballot should shake out.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, His Team, 11-5

Coach of the Year voters love signal-callers. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. When you solve a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson not only fixed his young quarterback; he's freed him. Given a proper system, Williams has been given the opportunity to demonstrate his rare talent. Since Week 9, the Chicago offense rank number four in offensive EPA per play. That's not a hot streak – it's consistent dominance. Under Johnson, Williams has become increasingly decisive, less reckless, and has eagerly submitted to the gameplan rather than improvising. It is an attack designed entirely in the coach's vision: a physical run game, a heavy helping of play-action passes and a creative passing attack that springs wide receiver targets everywhere. Williams has thrived. And when openings weren't there, he's been able to conjure magic out of broken plays.

The coach came to Chicago with a clear offensive vision. Almost each bet – rebuilding the offensive line, featuring the pass-catchers, transforming Williams into a rhythm thrower – has succeeded. This is rare for a first-year head coach. And it's rarer yet for a leader who entered the building with the kind of pressure he did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the most sought-after candidate on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a leader, there are no sure things. Remarkably, he has met expectations – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not just to be a scheme genius but the kind of culture builder that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.

In a normal season, Johnson would be the runaway favorite. Yet this isn't a typical year!

The area where his candidacy runs a bit into trouble is on the defensive side. The Bears presently rank in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on takeaways, and takeaways are famously inconsistent. Coaches can emphasise ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. He is on the ballot because the offense is sustainable. He's not higher because luck is doing an outsized share of the defensive heavy lifting. If not for a few breaks of the ball, the Bears would be two wins worse off. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the foundation is established for sustained winning. But he comes up just short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4

Coen is in a similar situation to his counterpart. He's a fellow first-time head coach who has orchestrated a rapid turnaround. During the crucial final weeks of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest overall ball of his career. And he's also spearheaded the remaking of a defense that now sits at fifth in the NFL in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more impressively, Coen has mastered the intangibles aspects, which wasn't a given following his early public introduction and some of his offseason decisions.

The coach walked into Jacksonville with an exceptionally inexperienced coaching staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the ideal staff cocktail of new ideas and veteran savvy, he bet on newbies. Starting with the head coach himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with rookies. That type of setup is intriguing in theory, but frequently collapses in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everyone is learning a their job on the fly. Yet he has managed to bring the entire group and everything together.

Following an early strong start, there was a risk that the season would go off the track. A mid-year collapse had the team stumbling again. That's typically when leaders panic and change too much. Coen didn't. Instead, he simplified the approach. The offense stopped chasing home-run answers and started hunting sustainable ones. The coach refocused the offense around key players and the running game, and asked Lawrence to use his legs more.

The outcomes are obvious. The Jags have won seven games consecutively and will be the conference's number three seed. Coen receives the slightest knock in the rankings because he inherited a talented team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that roster.

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

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

Moving on from a veteran, signing a new signal-caller and pairing him with an new offensive coordinator might have ended the campaign in the early weeks. Rather, it shaped it. Through the mid point of the year, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player candidate. He has fallen away since that hot streak, slipping to 23rd in efficiency per dropback over the second half of the schedule, putting him only a single place ahead of peers.

Still