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Typically, the NFL's Head Coach of the Year honor adheres to a straightforward pattern. It frequently acts as a form of mea culpa. Sorry we misjudged your franchise in our pre-campaign forecasts.

On paper, it's a direct path: the skipper who orchestrated the largest improvement wins the prize. However, it creates an yearly argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're actually honoring excellent leadership or just the most shocking shock.

Yet the latest race is fundamentally unique. The list of candidates is unusually strong. It has been the year of comebacks. The league has been chaotic, with recent division winners falling away and recent strugglers improving together. Under an typical season, a coach guiding the his team to the top of the AFC would make him the clear front-runner. But in such a turbulent and thrilling year, he's up against five other elite coaches.

Below is how the ideal ballot could look.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, Their Record

Voters for Coach of the Year selectors are fascinated by signal-callers. They always have. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. Should you solve a franchise QB, you're well on your way to winning the award.

Ben Johnson hasn't just corrected his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. In the right ecosystem, Williams has been given the opportunity to showcase his otherworldly talent. Since Week 9, the Bears rank fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a brief surge – it's consistent performance. Under Johnson, the quarterback has become more confident, far less careless, and has eagerly submitted to the scheme instead of going rogue. It is an offense constructed solely in the coach's image: a bully-ball run game, a steady dose of play-action passes and a imaginative passing attack that creates wide-open targets everywhere. Williams has thrived. And when clear throws haven't been available, he's been able to create big plays out of broken plays.

The coach came to Chicago with a clear offensive vision. Almost each bet – overhauling the offensive line, highlighting the tight ends, turning Williams into a timing-based thrower – has paid off. That's uncommon for a rookie skipper. And it's rarer still for a leader who entered the organization with the immense hype he did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the top candidate on the coaching market. But when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are no sure things. Somehow, Johnson has met the hype – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not just to be a offensive genius but the type of culture builder that can inject new life into an organization.

During a typical season, he would be the clear-cut choice. But this is not a normal year!

Where Johnson's candidacy runs slightly unstuck is on defense. The Bears currently sit in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are living on turnovers, and takeaways are notoriously fickle. Coaches can stress creating turnovers, but nobody can ensure it. He is on the ballot because the offensive production is legitimate. He's not higher because luck is doing an outsized share of the defense's heavy lifting. With a few bounces of the ball, the team would be several wins worse off. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is established for sustained winning. However Johnson falls just short here.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4

Coen is in a similar position to his counterpart. He's another first-time head coach who has masterminded a swift turnaround. During the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best overall football of his career. And he's also overseen the transformation of a defensive unit that now ranks fifth in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

Even more notably, he has mastered the intangibles aspects, which wasn't a given following his initial press conference introduction and some of his preseason decisions.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an uncommonly raw staff. In contrast to other coaches, who surrounded their staff with the perfect coaching blend of youth and veteran savvy, he bet on newbies. Starting with the leader himself to assistants to position coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with first-timers. That kind of approach is exciting on paper, but frequently collapses in practice – with other teams are a warning – because everybody is learning a new job in real-time. But Coen has pulled everyone and everything into sync.

After an early hot beginning, there was a chance that the season would go off the rails. A mid-year setback had the team stumbling again. That's usually when coaches panic and change too much. He did not. Instead, he simplified things. Jacksonville stopped pursuing home-run answers and started hunting sustainable ones. Coen recentered the offense around his playmakers and the ground attack, and asked his QB to use his legs more.

The outcomes are clear. The Jaguars have won multiple games in a row and will be the conference's number three playoff seed. Coen gets the slightest knock in the rankings because he took over a talented team, but he has proven he can get the most out of that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record

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

Parting ways from a incumbent, signing a new signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator could have ended the campaign in the early weeks. Instead, it defined it. Through the mid point of the season, the acquisition was an MVP front-runner. He has cooled off after that hot streak, dropping to 23rd in efficiency per pass attempt over the latter part of the schedule, placing him just one place ahead of other QBs.

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