How This Strange Season Shattered the Traditional Coach of the Year Mold.
Usually, the NFL's Coach of the Year award follows a simple script. It commonly functions as a form of mea culpa. We regret we got wrong your franchise in our pre-campaign forecasts.
Theoretically, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the skipper who engineered the biggest turnaround is handed the award. In reality, it creates an annual debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're actually rewarding excellent coaching or just the greatest shock.
But the latest competition is profoundly different. The pool of candidates is remarkably strong. It has been the season of turnarounds. The NFL has been chaotic, with recent division champions fading and recent strugglers improving in unison. Under an ordinary season, Sean Payton guiding the Denver Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the clear front-runner. Yet in such a chaotic and fun year, he's up against multiple other exceptional coaches.
This is how the projected ballot could be structured.
5) Ben Johnson, His Team, 11-5
Coach of the Year voters are fascinated by QBs. They always have. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. Should you transform a franchise QB, you're well on your way to winning the award.
Ben Johnson didn't merely corrected Caleb Williams; he's freed him. Given a proper environment, Williams has been given the opportunity to display his rare talent. Since midseason onward, the Chicago offense sit at number four in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a lucky run – it's prolonged dominance. With his guidance, Williams has become more decisive, less reckless, and has eagerly submitted to the gameplan instead of freelancing. It is an attack constructed solely in the coach's vision: a bully-ball run game, a steady helping of play-action and a creative aerial game that springs wide-open targets consistently. The QB has capitalized. And when easy reads weren't there, he's been able to create big plays out of broken plays.
The coach arrived to Chicago with a specific offensive philosophy. Almost every gamble – rebuilding the trenches, utilizing the tight ends, transforming Williams into a timing-based passer – has worked. This is rare for a rookie head coach. And it's even more uncommon yet for a leader who entered 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 selecting a leader, there are zero sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has lived up to expectations – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a scheme dork but the type of culture builder that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.
In a normal year, he would be the clear-cut favorite. Yet this is not a normal campaign!
The area where his case runs a bit unstuck is on defense. The Chicago defense currently sit 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on turnovers, and takeaways are famously fickle. Defensive minds can focus on ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offensive production is real. He's not higher because luck is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. If not for a few breaks of the ball, the Bears would be several victories behind. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the foundation is established for sustained winning. However Johnson falls short here.
4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4
Coen is in a comparable position to his counterpart. He's a fellow rookie leader who has engineered a swift turnaround. Over the stretch run of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best overall football of his professional life. And he's also overseen the overhaul of a defensive unit that now ranks number five in the league in Expected Points Added per play.
Even more impressively, Coen has excelled at the intangibles stuff, which wasn't a certainty after his early press conference appearances and some of his offseason moves.
The coach took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally raw staff. In contrast to Johnson, who packed themselves with the ideal staff mix of new ideas and experience, Coen trusted first-timers. Starting with the head coach himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are filled with rookies. That kind of setup is exciting on paper, but frequently fails in reality – as past failures are a warning – because everybody is learning a their job on the fly. But Coen has managed to bring everyone and everything into sync.
After an early hot start, there was a possibility that the campaign would go off the track. A mid-year setback caused the Jags stumbling again. That's typically when leaders overcorrect. Coen didn't. Instead, he streamlined the approach. Jacksonville stopped pursuing home-run plays and started hunting reliable ones. Coen refocused the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and asked Lawrence to use his legs more often.
The outcomes are clear. The Jaguars have won seven games consecutively and will be the AFC's No 3 playoff seed. Coen gets the tiniest deduction in the rankings because he inherited a skilled team, but he has proven he can maximize that talent.
3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, 13-3
Each Coach of the Year narrative has a defining decision. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback move.
Parting ways from a veteran, bringing in a different signal-caller and partnering him with an innovative offensive coordinator might have ended the campaign in October. Rather, it made it. By the mid point of the year, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player candidate. He has regressed after that time, dropping to 23rd in EPA per dropback over the second half of the schedule, placing him just one place ahead of peers.
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