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Usually, the NFL's Coach of the Year award follows a simple pattern. It often serves as a type of mea culpa. Our apologies we misjudged your franchise in our preseason projections.

On paper, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the coach who orchestrated the biggest improvement wins the award. However, it fuels an annual discussion about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly rewarding excellent leadership or merely the biggest surprise.

Yet the current competition is profoundly different. The pool of contenders is exceptionally talented. It has been the campaign of resurgences. The league has been chaotic, with reigning conference champions fading and longtime also-rans ascending collectively. Under an normal year, a coach guiding the Denver Broncos to the top of the conference would make him the stone-cold favorite. Yet in this wild and entertaining season, he's up against multiple other elite coaches.

This is how the projected vote should shake out.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, 11-5

Coach of the Year selectors love signal-callers. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. If you transform a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson didn't merely corrected Caleb Williams; he's freed him. In the right ecosystem, Williams has been afforded the opportunity to display his special talent. Since midseason onward, the Bears sit at fourth in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a lucky run – it's sustained dominance. With his guidance, the quarterback has become more decisive, far less reckless, and has eagerly surrendered to the scheme instead of improvising. It is an offense built entirely in the coach's image: a physical run game, a consistent helping of play-action passes and a innovative passing attack that creates wide receiver targets all over the field. Williams has taken advantage. And when clear throws weren't there, he's been capable to spin big plays out of broken plays.

Johnson arrived to the Bears with a defined offensive vision. Virtually every gamble – overhauling the offensive line, utilizing the pass-catchers, turning Williams into a rhythm thrower – has paid off. This is rare for a rookie head coach. And it's rarer still for a coach who walked into the organization with the kind of hype he did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the top name on the coaching carousel. But when it comes to hiring a leader, there are no guarantees. Somehow, Johnson has lived up to expectations – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not only to be a offensive genius but the type of leader that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.

In a typical year, Johnson would be the clear-cut favorite. But the current is not a typical year!

Where Johnson's case runs a bit unstuck is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense currently rank in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on turnovers, and takeaways are famously unreliable. Coaches can emphasise creating turnovers, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offensive production is real. He's ranked lower because variance is doing an outsized share of the defensive work. If not for a few breaks of the ball, the team would be several wins behind. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the core is in place for sustained success. However Johnson falls short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4

Coen is in a similar situation to Johnson. He's a fellow rookie head coach who has masterminded a dramatic turnaround. During the crucial final weeks 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 ranks fifth in the NFL in EPA per play.

What's more impressively, he has nailed the leadership stuff, which wasn't a certainty after his early press conference introduction and some of his offseason moves.

Coen took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally inexperienced coaching staff. Unlike Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the ideal staff mix of new ideas and experience, he hired first-timers. From the leader on down to coordinators to position coaches, the Jaguars are filled with first-timers. That type of approach is intriguing on paper, but frequently collapses in practice – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everybody is learning a their job on the fly. Yet Coen has pulled everyone and everything into sync.

After an initial hot start, there was a possibility that the campaign would go off the track. A mid-year setback caused the Jags wobbling again. That's usually when leaders panic and change too much. He didn't. Instead, he streamlined things. Jacksonville stopped chasing home-run plays and started hunting reliable ones. Coen refocused the offense around his playmakers and the ground attack, and asked Lawrence to use his legs more often.

The results are evident. The Jags have won multiple games in a row and will be the conference's number three playoff seed. He gets the tiniest deduction in the standings because he took over a skilled roster, but he has proven he can maximize that roster.

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

Each Coach of the Year argument has a defining decision. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB decision.

Parting ways from a veteran, signing a different signal-caller and pairing him with an new offensive coordinator might have derailed the season in October. Rather, it defined it. Through the mid point of the season, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player front-runner. He has fallen away since that time, slipping to a lower rank in EPA per dropback over the second half of the season, placing him only one place ahead of other QBs.

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