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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Coach of the Year trophy adheres to a simple pattern. It commonly serves as a form of mea culpa. Our apologies we underestimated your team in our preseason predictions.

On paper, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the coach who orchestrated the largest improvement wins the award. However, it sparks an yearly debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely honoring superior coaching or just the greatest upset.

However the current field is fundamentally different. The pool of contenders is remarkably strong. It has been the campaign of turnarounds. The NFL has been chaotic, with reigning conference winners fading and longtime underperformers rising in unison. Under an typical season, Sean Payton leading the Denver Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the stone-cold front-runner. But in such a chaotic and entertaining year, he's up against several other elite coaches.

Here is how the hypothetical vote could look.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, 11-5

Coach of the Year selectors are fascinated by QBs. They always have. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. If you solve a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson didn't merely fixed his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. Within an ideal ecosystem, Williams has been given the opportunity to showcase his special talent. From midseason onward, the Bears sit at number four in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's prolonged excellence. With his guidance, Williams has become increasingly confident, far less careless, and has eagerly submitted to the scheme rather than improvising. It is an offense constructed solely in the coach's image: a bully-ball ground attack, a heavy helping of play-action and a innovative aerial game that frees wide receiver receivers all over the field. The QB has thrived. And when clear throws haven't been available, he's been capable to spin magic out of broken plays.

Johnson arrived to Chicago with a clear offensive blueprint. Almost each decision – rebuilding the offensive line, highlighting the tight ends, turning Williams into a timing-based thrower – has succeeded. That's rare for a first-year head coach. And it's rarer still for a coach who walked into the organization with the immense hype Johnson did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the most sought-after candidate on the head coaching carousel. But when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero guarantees. Somehow, Johnson has lived up to the hype – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not just to be a scheme dork but the type of leader that can breathe new life into an organization.

In a typical season, Johnson would be the runaway choice. But this isn't a normal campaign!

The area where Johnson's candidacy runs slightly into trouble is on defense. The Bears presently sit in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are relying on turnovers, and turnovers are famously unreliable. Coaches can stress ball disruption, but no one can ensure it. He is on the ballot because the offensive production is sustainable. He's ranked lower because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. With a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be two victories behind. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the foundation is established for sustained winning. But he falls short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, Their Record

Coen is in a comparable situation to his counterpart. He's another rookie leader who has orchestrated a dramatic resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest overall football of his professional life. And he's also overseen the transformation of a defensive unit that now sits at number five in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more impressively, he has nailed the intangibles stuff, which wasn't a given after his early press conference appearances and some of his offseason decisions.

Coen took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally raw staff. In contrast to Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the ideal staff blend of youth and experience, he trusted newbies. Starting with the leader himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with rookies. That type of setup is intriguing on paper, but often collapses in reality – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a their job in real-time. But Coen has managed to bring the entire group and everything into sync.

Following an early hot beginning, there was a chance that the season would go off the track. A midseason setback had the team stumbling once more. That's typically when coaches panic and change too much. He didn't. Rather, he simplified the approach. Jacksonville stopped pursuing explosive plays and started hunting reliable ones. Coen refocused the offense around his playmakers and the running game, and asked his QB to use his mobility more.

The outcomes are clear. The Jags have won multiple games consecutively and will be the conference's number three seed. Coen receives the slightest knock in the standings because he took over a skilled team, but he has proven he can get the most out of that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record

Each Coach of the Year argument has a pivotal moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback move.

Moving on from a veteran, signing a different quarterback and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator might have ended the campaign in October. Instead, it shaped it. By the mid point of the year, the new QB was an MVP front-runner. He has regressed after that hot streak, slipping to a lower rank in efficiency per pass attempt over the latter part of the season, placing him just one spot ahead of other QBs.

Still