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Typically, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor follows a simple formula. It often functions as a kind of apology. Sorry we underestimated your team in our pre-campaign forecasts.

On paper, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the skipper who oversaw the largest improvement receives the award. In reality, it fuels an yearly debate about expectations and whether we're genuinely rewarding superior coaching or simply the biggest upset.

Yet the latest field is profoundly different. The pool of contenders is exceptionally deep. It has been the year of comebacks. The league has been messy, with reigning conference champions declining and recent also-rans rising together. In an normal year, a coach guiding the his team to the summit of the conference would make him the stone-cold front-runner. Yet in such a chaotic and entertaining year, he's facing several other outstanding coaches.

Below is how the hypothetical ballot should shake out.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, Their Record

Coach of the Year selectors adore QBs. History shows this. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. If you fix a franchise QB, you're halfway home.

Ben Johnson didn't merely corrected Caleb Williams; he's unleashed him. Given a proper ecosystem, Williams has been given the chance to demonstrate his special ability. From midseason onward, the Chicago offense rank number four in offensive EPA per play. That's not a brief surge – it's sustained dominance. With his guidance, Williams has become more confident, far less careless, and has eagerly submitted to the scheme instead of improvising. It is an offense built solely in Johnson's vision: a bully-ball run game, a heavy helping of play-action and a imaginative passing attack that springs wide-open receivers everywhere. Williams has capitalized. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been capable to spin big plays from broken plays.

Johnson arrived to the Bears with a specific offensive philosophy. Virtually every gamble – overhauling the offensive line, featuring the tight ends, transforming Williams into a rhythm passer – has worked. This is uncommon for a first-year head coach. And it's rarer yet for a coach who walked into the organization with the kind of expectations he did. For two straight cycles, he was the most sought-after name on the head coaching market. However when it comes to hiring a leader, there are no sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has lived up to the hype – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a scheme wizard but the type of leader that can inject new life into an organization.

During a normal season, he would be the clear-cut favorite. But this isn't a normal campaign!

Where his case comes a bit unstuck is on defense. The Chicago defense presently rank 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on turnovers, and turnovers are famously unreliable. Coaches can stress ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. He is on the ballot because the offense is legitimate. He's not higher because luck is doing an outsized share of the defense's heavy lifting. If not for a couple bounces of the ball, the team would be several victories worse off. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is established for sustained winning. But Johnson comes up just short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, Their Record

Coen is in a comparable spot to his counterpart. He's another first-time leader who has engineered a swift turnaround. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the most complete all-around ball of his career. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defensive unit that now sits at fifth in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

Even more notably, he has excelled at the intangibles aspects, which wasn't a given after his initial public introduction and some of his offseason moves.

Coen walked into the Jaguars with an exceptionally inexperienced staff. Unlike other coaches, who packed their staff with the ideal staff cocktail of new ideas and veteran savvy, Coen bet on newbies. From the head coach on down to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are filled with rookies. That type of setup is intriguing on paper, but frequently collapses in reality – as past failures are a warning – because everyone is figuring out a new job on the fly. Yet Coen has managed to bring the entire group and all elements together.

After an early hot start, there was a risk that the campaign would go off the rails. A mid-year setback caused the team wobbling again. That's usually when leaders overcorrect. Coen did not. Instead, he simplified things. The offense stopped pursuing explosive plays and started seeking consistent ones. The coach recentered the attack around key players and the running game, and asked his QB to use his mobility more often.

The outcomes are evident. The Jags have won seven games consecutively and will be the AFC's No 3 seed. Coen gets the tiniest knock in the standings because he took over a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, 13-3

Each Strong of the Year argument has a defining moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback move.

Parting ways from a veteran, bringing in a new signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator could have ended the campaign in October. Rather, it defined it. By the middle point of the season, the acquisition was an MVP front-runner. He has cooled off after that time, slipping to 23rd in efficiency per pass attempt over the second half of the schedule, placing him just one place ahead of other QBs.

Still