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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Coach of the Year award follows a straightforward formula. It commonly serves as a form of mea culpa. We regret we underestimated your team in our pre-campaign predictions.

In theory, it's a clear-cut path: the coach who orchestrated the most dramatic resurgence receives the award. However, it fuels an yearly discussion about preseason outlooks and whether we're actually rewarding superior leadership or simply the greatest shock.

Yet the current field is fundamentally different. The group of nominees is exceptionally talented. It has been the season of turnarounds. The league has been messy, with reigning conference champions declining and longtime underperformers improving together. In an normal season, a coach guiding the his team to the summit of the conference would make him the clear favorite. Yet in this turbulent and entertaining season, he's facing several other outstanding candidates.

Below is how the ideal ballot ought to look.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, 11-5

Coach of the Year selectors love quarterbacks. History shows this. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. When you transform a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson hasn't just fixed Caleb Williams; he's unleashed him. In the right ecosystem, Williams has been given the chance to display his special talent. Since Week 9, the Chicago offense rank fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a lucky run – it's sustained excellence. With his guidance, the quarterback has become more confident, far less reckless, and has eagerly surrendered to the scheme instead of freelancing. It is an attack designed solely in the coach's image: a bully-ball run game, a consistent dose of play-action passes and a innovative aerial game that creates wide receiver targets all over the field. Williams has capitalized. And when openings weren't there, he's been able to conjure magic from broken plays.

The coach came to the Bears with a clear offensive philosophy. Virtually every decision – rebuilding the offensive line, utilizing the tight ends, turning the QB into a rhythm passer – has worked. This is rare for a rookie head coach. And it's even more uncommon yet for a coach who walked into the building with the immense pressure Johnson did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the top name on the coaching carousel. However when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are no guarantees. Somehow, he has met the hype – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a offensive dork but the type of leader that can breathe new life into an franchise.

In a ordinary year, he would be the runaway choice. But the current is not a typical season!

The area where his case comes a bit into trouble is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense presently rank in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on takeaways, and takeaways are notoriously inconsistent. Coaches can stress creating turnovers, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offense is legitimate. He's ranked lower because variance is doing too much of the defense's work. If not for a few bounces of the ball, the team would be two wins worse off. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the core is established for long-term winning. But Johnson falls just short in this ranking.

4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar situation to Johnson. He's another rookie leader who has engineered a rapid resurgence. During the crucial final weeks of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best all-around football of his career. And he's also spearheaded the remaking of a defensive unit that now ranks number five in the NFL in Expected Points Added per play.

Even more impressively, Coen has mastered the off-field aspects, which was not a guarantee after his early press conference introduction and some of his offseason decisions.

The coach walked into Jacksonville with an uncommonly raw coaching staff. In contrast to Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the ideal coaching blend of new ideas and experience, Coen bet on first-timers. Starting with the head coach himself to coordinators to position coaches, the Jags are stocked with rookies. That type of approach is exciting in theory, but often collapses in practice – as past failures are a warning – because everybody is learning a their job in real-time. But he has pulled the entire group and all elements together.

Following an initial hot beginning, there was a risk that the campaign would go off the track. A midseason collapse caused the team wobbling again. That's usually when coaches panic and change too much. He didn't. Instead, he simplified things. Jacksonville stopped pursuing home-run answers and started seeking consistent ones. Coen refocused the offense around his playmakers and the ground attack, and encouraged his QB to use his mobility more often.

The outcomes are obvious. The Jaguars have won multiple games consecutively and will be the AFC's No 3 playoff seed. He gets the slightest deduction in the standings because he inherited a talented roster, but he has proven he can get the most out of that talent.

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

Each Coach of the Year narrative has a pivotal moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB choice.

Parting ways from a incumbent, signing a different signal-caller and pairing him with an new offensive coordinator could have derailed the season in October. Instead, it shaped it. Through the middle point of the season, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has regressed since that time, dropping to a lower rank in EPA per dropback over the latter part of the season, placing him only one place ahead of peers.

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