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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Coach of the Year trophy follows a simple script. It commonly acts as a kind of apology. Sorry we misjudged your franchise in our preseason forecasts.

Theoretically, it's a clear-cut path: the coach who oversaw the biggest improvement wins the award. In practice, it sparks an annual argument about expectations and whether we're actually honoring superior coaching or simply the greatest upset.

However the latest race is distinctly unique. The group of candidates is remarkably talented. It has been the year of comebacks. The NFL has been messy, with recent division champions falling away and recent also-rans rising collectively. During an typical season, a coach leading the Denver Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the overwhelming front-runner. Yet in this wild and entertaining year, he's up against several other outstanding coaches.

Here is how the ideal ballot should look.

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

Voters for Coach of the Year voters love quarterbacks. They always have. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. When you transform a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson hasn't just corrected his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. Given a proper environment, the QB has been afforded the opportunity to display his rare talent. Since Week 9, the Bears rank number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's prolonged dominance. With his guidance, the quarterback has become increasingly confident, less careless, and has willingly surrendered to the scheme instead of going rogue. It is an attack constructed entirely in Johnson's vision: a bully-ball ground attack, a consistent helping of play-action and a imaginative passing attack that springs wide-open receivers all over the field. Williams has thrived. And when openings weren't available, he's been able to spin magic out of broken plays.

Johnson came to the Bears with a clear offensive philosophy. Almost every gamble – rebuilding the offensive line, featuring the pass-catchers, turning Williams into a timing-based thrower – has succeeded. This is rare for a first-year head coach. And it's rarer yet for a coach who walked into the organization with the level of expectations he did. For two straight cycles, he was the most sought-after candidate on the coaching carousel. However when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are zero sure things. Somehow, Johnson has met the hype – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not only to be a offensive genius but the type of culture builder that can inject fresh energy into an organization.

In a normal season, he would be the clear-cut choice. But the current isn't a typical year!

Where his case runs a bit into trouble is on defense. The Bears presently rank 25th in defensive efficiency. They are living on takeaways, and turnovers are famously unreliable. Defensive minds can emphasise creating turnovers, but nobody can ensure it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offensive production is legitimate. He's ranked lower because luck is doing too much of the defense's heavy lifting. With a few bounces of the ball, the Bears would be several wins worse off. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the core is in place for long-term success. But he falls just short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar situation to his counterpart. He's another first-time leader who has engineered a dramatic resurgence. During the crucial final weeks of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the most complete all-around football of his professional life. And he's also overseen the transformation of a defensive unit that now sits at fifth in the NFL in EPA per play.

What's more impressively, he has excelled at the intangibles stuff, which wasn't a certainty following his early press conference introduction and some of his preseason moves.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an exceptionally inexperienced coaching staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the perfect staff cocktail of new ideas and experience, he bet on first-timers. Starting with the leader on down to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with first-timers. That type of approach is intriguing in theory, but frequently fails in practice – with other teams are a warning – because everyone is learning a new job on the fly. Yet Coen has pulled the entire group and everything together.

After an initial hot start, there was a chance that the campaign would go off the track. A midseason collapse caused the Jags stumbling once more. That's usually when coaches panic and change too much. He did not. Rather, he streamlined the approach. Jacksonville stopped chasing home-run answers and started hunting sustainable ones. Coen refocused the attack around key players and the ground attack, and encouraged Lawrence to use his mobility more.

The results are evident. The Jags have won seven games in a row and will be the AFC's number three seed. He gets the tiniest knock in the standings because he took over a talented team, but he has proven he can get the most out of that talent.

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

Every Coach of the Year argument has a hinge moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB move.

Parting ways from a incumbent, bringing in a new quarterback and partnering him with an innovative play-caller could have ended the season in the early weeks. Rather, it made it. Through the middle point of the season, the new QB was an MVP candidate. He has cooled off after that hot streak, slipping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the season, placing him just one spot ahead of peers.

Still