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Usually, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor follows a simple formula. It frequently serves as a form of mea culpa. Our apologies we got wrong your team in our pre-campaign projections.

In theory, it's a direct trajectory: the skipper who oversaw the biggest improvement receives the prize. In reality, it creates an annual debate about expectations and whether we're truly honoring superior coaching or merely the biggest surprise.

Yet the latest field is profoundly unique. The group of candidates is unusually strong. It has been the season of comebacks. The league has been unpredictable, with recent division winners declining and recent also-rans improving together. In an typical year, a coach leading the his team to the summit of the conference would make him the stone-cold front-runner. Yet in this wild and entertaining year, he's up against multiple other exceptional candidates.

This is how the hypothetical vote should look.

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

Coach of the Year voters love QBs. History shows this. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. When you fix a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach hasn't just fixed his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. Given a proper system, the QB has been given the chance to demonstrate his otherworldly talent. From Week 9, the Bears sit at fourth in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a hot streak – it's prolonged performance. Under Johnson, Williams has become increasingly decisive, less careless, and has willingly submitted to the scheme instead of freelancing. It is an offense built entirely in Johnson's image: a physical run game, a heavy dose of play-action passes and a imaginative aerial game that creates wide receiver receivers consistently. The QB has thrived. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been capable to create big plays out of broken plays.

Johnson arrived to Chicago with a clear offensive vision. Almost every decision – rebuilding the trenches, utilizing the tight ends, turning the QB into a timing-based thrower – has worked. That's rare for a first-year skipper. And it's even more uncommon still for a coach who walked into the organization with the immense expectations Johnson did. For two straight offseasons, he was the top candidate on the head coaching market. But when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are zero sure things. Remarkably, he has lived up to the hype – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not only to be a offensive wizard but the type of leader that can inject fresh energy into an organization.

In a normal year, Johnson would be the overwhelming choice. Yet this isn't a normal year!

Where his candidacy comes a bit unstuck is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense presently rank 25th in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on takeaways, and takeaways are notoriously fickle. Defensive minds can emphasise creating turnovers, but no one can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offensive production is legitimate. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. If not for a couple bounces of the ball, the team would be several wins worse off. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the core is in place for sustained success. However he falls short here.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, Their Record

Coen is in a comparable position to Johnson. He's a fellow first-time head coach who has orchestrated a rapid resurgence. During the stretch run of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best overall ball of his career. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defensive unit that now sits at fifth in the NFL in Expected Points Added per play.

Even more notably, Coen has excelled at the leadership stuff, which wasn't a certainty after his initial public introduction and some of his preseason moves.

Coen took over Jacksonville with an uncommonly raw staff. Unlike Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the perfect coaching blend of youth and veteran savvy, he bet on newbies. From the head coach himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with rookies. That kind of setup is intriguing in theory, but frequently fails in practice – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everybody is figuring out a their job in real-time. Yet he has managed to bring everyone and all elements together.

After an early hot beginning, there was a risk that the season would go off the rails. A midseason setback caused the Jags stumbling once more. That's typically when coaches panic and change too much. He didn't. Instead, he simplified things. Jacksonville stopped chasing explosive answers and started hunting sustainable ones. The coach refocused the attack around key players and the running game, and asked Lawrence to use his legs more often.

The outcomes are evident. The Jaguars have won multiple games in a row and will be the conference's number three playoff seed. Coen receives the tiniest deduction in the rankings because he inherited a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that talent.

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

Every Strong of the Year argument has a defining moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback decision.

Parting ways from a veteran, signing a different signal-caller and partnering him with an new offensive coordinator could have derailed the campaign in the early weeks. Rather, it defined it. By the mid point of the season, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player candidate. He has fallen away since that time, dropping to a lower rank in EPA per pass attempt over the second half of the season, putting him just one place ahead of other QBs.

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