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Usually, the National Football League's Coach of the Year award follows a simple script. It often acts as a kind of apology. Our apologies we misjudged your franchise in our preseason predictions.

Theoretically, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the coach who engineered the most dramatic resurgence wins the award. In practice, it fuels an yearly discussion about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely rewarding excellent leadership or merely the greatest surprise.

But this year's race is fundamentally unique. The list of nominees is unusually deep. It has been the season of turnarounds. The NFL has been chaotic, with reigning conference winners falling away and longtime also-rans improving collectively. Under an normal year, a coach leading the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the overwhelming favorite. But in this chaotic and thrilling season, he's up against five other elite coaches.

Here is how the ideal vote could be structured.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, Their Record

Coach of the Year voters are fascinated by QBs. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. When you transform a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson not only corrected Caleb Williams; he's unlocked him. Within an ideal system, Williams has been given the opportunity to demonstrate his special talent. Since midseason onward, the Bears rank fourth in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a hot streak – it's sustained dominance. With Johnson, Williams has become increasingly decisive, less reckless, and has willingly submitted to the system rather than improvising. It is an offense designed entirely in the coach's image: a bully-ball run game, a steady dose of play-action and a creative passing attack that creates wide-open receivers all over the field. The QB has taken advantage. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been able to create magic out of broken plays.

The coach came to the Bears with a specific offensive philosophy. Almost each decision – rebuilding the trenches, utilizing the tight ends, turning Williams into a rhythm thrower – has succeeded. That's uncommon for a rookie head coach. And it's even more uncommon yet for a coach who walked into the building with the kind of pressure he did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the most sought-after name on the head coaching market. But when it comes to selecting a leader, there are no sure things. Remarkably, he has lived up to expectations – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not only to be a scheme dork but the type of culture builder that can inject new life into an organization.

During a normal year, he would be the clear-cut favorite. But the current is not a typical season!

Where his candidacy comes a bit unstuck is on the defensive side. The Bears currently sit in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are living on takeaways, and turnovers are famously inconsistent. Defensive minds can focus on creating turnovers, but nobody can ensure it. He is on the ballot because the offensive production is legitimate. He's ranked lower because variance is doing too much of the defensive 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 in place for long-term winning. However Johnson falls short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar situation to his counterpart. He's a fellow first-time leader who has orchestrated a dramatic turnaround. During the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest all-around ball of his professional life. 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 notably, Coen has mastered the intangibles stuff, which wasn't a certainty after his early public appearances and some of his preseason decisions.

Coen walked into Jacksonville with an exceptionally raw staff. In contrast to other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the perfect staff cocktail of new ideas and veteran savvy, he hired newbies. From the leader on down to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with rookies. That type of setup is intriguing on paper, but often collapses in practice – with other teams are a warning – because everyone is figuring out a new job on the fly. But Coen has pulled the entire group and everything together.

After an early hot start, there was a risk that the campaign would veer off the rails. A midseason setback caused the Jags wobbling once more. That's typically when leaders panic and change too much. Coen didn't. Rather, he streamlined the approach. The offense stopped chasing home-run plays and started hunting sustainable ones. The coach refocused the attack around key players and the ground attack, and asked Lawrence to use his mobility more.

The outcomes are clear. The Jags have won multiple games in a row and will be the conference's No 3 seed. He gets the tiniest deduction in the rankings because he inherited a skilled roster, but he has proven he can maximize that talent.

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

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

Parting ways from a incumbent, bringing in a different signal-caller and partnering him with an new play-caller might have derailed the season in October. Rather, it defined it. By the middle point of the season, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player front-runner. He has cooled off since that time, dropping to a lower rank in EPA per pass attempt over the latter part of the schedule, putting him only one place ahead of other QBs.

Still