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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year trophy adheres to a simple pattern. It commonly serves as a form of apology. We regret we underestimated your team in our preseason projections.

In theory, it's a direct path: the coach who oversaw the biggest turnaround wins the award. In reality, it creates an annual discussion about preseason outlooks and whether we're actually honoring superior coaching or merely the greatest shock.

Yet the latest race is profoundly different. The list of candidates is exceptionally talented. It has been the season of resurgences. The NFL has been chaotic, with recent conference champions fading and recent underperformers ascending collectively. Under an typical year, a coach guiding the Denver Broncos to the top of the conference would make him the stone-cold favorite. But in such a turbulent and thrilling year, he's competing with five other exceptional candidates.

Here is how the ideal vote ought to shake out.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, Their Record

Voters for Coach of the Year selectors love QBs. History shows this. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. When you fix a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach didn't merely corrected Caleb Williams; he's unlocked him. Within an ideal ecosystem, the QB has been afforded the chance to demonstrate his special ability. Since Week 9, the Chicago offense rank number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a hot streak – it's sustained performance. Under his guidance, the quarterback has become more confident, less careless, and has eagerly submitted to the system instead of going rogue. It is an attack designed solely in Johnson's image: a bully-ball run game, a consistent helping of play-action passes and a creative passing attack that frees wide-open targets consistently. Williams has capitalized. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been capable to conjure big plays out of nothing.

Johnson came to the Bears with a specific offensive vision. Almost each decision – overhauling the offensive line, highlighting the pass-catchers, transforming the QB into a rhythm passer – has paid off. This is uncommon for a rookie skipper. And it's rarer still for a coach who walked into the organization with the level of hype he did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the hottest name on the head coaching carousel. But when it comes to hiring a leader, there are no sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has met the hype – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not only to be a offensive genius but the kind of culture builder that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.

During a typical year, he would be the runaway favorite. But this is not a typical campaign!

Where his case comes slightly into trouble is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense currently sit in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are relying on takeaways, and takeaways are famously inconsistent. Coaches can emphasise ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is real. He's ranked lower because variance is doing too much of the defensive heavy lifting. With a few bounces of the ball, the Bears would be two victories behind. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is established for sustained winning. However Johnson falls short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4

Coen is in a similar spot to Johnson. He's another first-time leader who has engineered a swift turnaround. During the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best overall ball of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defensive unit that now sits at number five in the NFL in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more notably, Coen has excelled at the intangibles aspects, which was not a given following his early public introduction and some of his preseason decisions.

Coen walked into the Jaguars with an uncommonly raw coaching staff. In contrast to other coaches, who surrounded their staff with the ideal coaching cocktail of new ideas and veteran savvy, he bet on first-timers. Starting with the leader on down to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are filled with rookies. That type of setup is intriguing in theory, but often fails in practice – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everybody is figuring out a their job in real-time. Yet Coen has pulled everyone and everything together.

After an initial hot beginning, there was a chance that the campaign would veer off the track. A midseason setback caused the Jags wobbling once more. That's usually when coaches overcorrect. Coen didn't. Instead, he streamlined the approach. The offense stopped pursuing home-run plays and started seeking sustainable ones. Coen refocused the offense around key players and the ground attack, and asked his QB to use his mobility more.

The results are clear. The Jaguars have won seven games in a row and will be the conference's No 3 playoff seed. Coen gets the tiniest knock in the standings because he took over a talented roster, but he has proven he can get the most out of that roster.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record

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

Moving on from a veteran, bringing in a new signal-caller and partnering him with an innovative play-caller could have derailed the campaign in the early weeks. Rather, it shaped it. By the mid point of the year, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player candidate. He has cooled off since that time, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the schedule, putting him only a single spot ahead of other QBs.

Still