How The Strange Season Shattered the Conventional Coach of the Year Blueprint.
Ordinarily, the NFL's Head Coach of the Year honor adheres to a straightforward formula. It often serves as a type of mea culpa. Our apologies we got wrong your squad in our preseason predictions.
On paper, it's a direct line: the skipper who oversaw the largest improvement receives the award. In practice, it fuels an annual debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly honoring superior coaching or just the biggest surprise.
But this year's race is profoundly unique. The pool of contenders is remarkably strong. It has been the campaign of resurgences. The NFL has been messy, with reigning conference winners declining and recent strugglers rising together. In an normal year, a coach guiding the his team to the summit of the conference would make him the clear front-runner. Yet in this wild and entertaining season, he's competing with five other elite coaches.
This is how the hypothetical ballot could be structured.
5) Ben Johnson, His Team, Their Record
Coach of the Year selectors adore quarterbacks. History shows this. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. When you fix a quarterback, you're halfway home.
Ben Johnson not only fixed his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. Within an ideal system, the QB has been afforded the opportunity to demonstrate his rare talent. From Week 9, the Bears rank number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a lucky run – it's prolonged dominance. With Johnson, the quarterback has become increasingly confident, less careless, and has willingly submitted to the scheme instead of going rogue. It is an attack designed solely in the coach's image: a bully-ball run game, a heavy dose of play-action passes and a creative passing attack that frees wide-open receivers consistently. Williams has taken advantage. And when clear throws haven't been available, he's been capable to spin magic out of nothing.
The coach came to Chicago with a clear offensive vision. Almost every decision – rebuilding the trenches, featuring the pass-catchers, transforming Williams into a rhythm passer – has worked. That's rare for a rookie head coach. And it's rarer yet for a coach who entered the organization with the level of expectations Johnson did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the hottest name on the head coaching market. But when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are no guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has met the hype – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not only to be a scheme dork but the kind of culture builder that can breathe new life into an organization.
During a normal season, he would be the clear-cut favorite. But this is not a normal campaign!
The area where his case runs slightly into trouble is on the defensive side. The Bears currently rank in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on takeaways, and turnovers are notoriously fickle. Coaches 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 an outsized share of the defense's heavy lifting. If not for a few breaks of the ball, the Bears would be two wins behind. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the foundation is in place for sustained success. But Johnson comes up just short here.
4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4
The Jaguars' coach is in a similar situation to his counterpart. He's a fellow first-time leader who has masterminded a dramatic resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best all-around football of his career. And he's also spearheaded the remaking of a defensive unit that now ranks fifth in the league in Expected Points Added per play.
Even more notably, Coen has mastered the leadership aspects, which was not a guarantee following his early public appearances and some of his preseason decisions.
Coen walked into the Jaguars with an exceptionally raw coaching staff. In contrast to other coaches, who packed their staff with the ideal staff blend of youth and experience, he bet on first-timers. From the head coach on down to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with rookies. That kind of setup is intriguing in theory, but frequently fails in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a new job in real-time. Yet he has pulled the entire group and all elements into sync.
After an initial strong start, there was a possibility that the campaign would veer off the rails. A mid-year collapse caused the Jags wobbling again. That's typically when leaders overcorrect. He did not. Instead, he simplified the approach. Jacksonville stopped chasing home-run plays and started hunting sustainable ones. Coen refocused the offense around his playmakers and the running game, and asked his QB to use his legs more often.
The outcomes are clear. The Jags have won multiple games in a row and will be the AFC's No 3 seed. He gets the slightest knock in the rankings because he took over a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that talent.
3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record
Every Coach of the Year case has a pivotal decision. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB choice.
Moving on from a veteran, signing a different quarterback and pairing him with an new play-caller could have ended the campaign in October. Instead, it made it. By the middle point of the year, the acquisition was an MVP front-runner. He has cooled off since that hot streak, slipping to 23rd in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the schedule, putting him just one place ahead of other QBs.
Still
