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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor adheres to a straightforward formula. It often serves as a type of mea culpa. We regret we underestimated your team in our preseason predictions.

On paper, it's a clear-cut path: the coach who engineered the most dramatic improvement is handed the prize. In reality, it fuels an annual debate about expectations and whether we're actually rewarding excellent leadership or just the biggest shock.

Yet the current field is profoundly unique. The list of nominees is exceptionally talented. It has been the season of turnarounds. The NFL has been unpredictable, with recent division winners declining and recent also-rans rising together. During an normal season, a coach guiding the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the clear front-runner. But in such a wild and thrilling season, he's competing with five other exceptional coaches.

Below is how the ideal vote could look.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, Their Record

Voters for Coach of the Year voters are fascinated by quarterbacks. History shows this. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. If you transform a franchise QB, you're halfway home.

Ben Johnson didn't merely corrected Caleb Williams; he's freed him. In the right environment, the QB has been afforded the opportunity to demonstrate his rare talent. Since Week 9, the Bears sit at number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a lucky run – it's sustained performance. Under his guidance, Williams has become more confident, far less careless, and has eagerly submitted to the system rather than going rogue. It is an attack constructed entirely in Johnson's image: a bully-ball run game, a heavy dose of play-action passes and a creative passing attack that springs wide receiver receivers consistently. The QB has taken advantage. And when clear throws haven't been there, he's been capable to conjure magic out of broken plays.

Johnson came to the Bears with a clear offensive vision. Almost each decision – overhauling the offensive line, highlighting the tight ends, turning Williams into a timing-based thrower – has worked. This is rare for a rookie skipper. And it's even more uncommon still for a coach who walked into the organization with the kind of expectations Johnson did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the most sought-after candidate on the coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are no guarantees. Somehow, Johnson has met expectations – and even exceeded them. He's proven not just to be a scheme genius but the kind of leader that can inject new life into an franchise.

In a normal year, he would be the clear-cut choice. Yet this is not a normal year!

The area where Johnson's candidacy comes slightly into trouble is on defense. The Chicago defense currently rank 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on turnovers, and turnovers are notoriously unreliable. Coaches can emphasise creating turnovers, but no one can guarantee it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offense is real. He's ranked lower because luck is doing too much of the defense's work. With a couple bounces of the ball, the team would be two wins worse off. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the foundation is in place for sustained winning. However Johnson comes up short in this ranking.

4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, His Team, Their Record

Coen is in a similar position to Johnson. He's another rookie leader who has orchestrated a dramatic resurgence. During the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the most complete overall ball of his career. And he's also overseen the overhaul of a defense that now sits at fifth in the NFL in EPA per play.

Even more notably, Coen has mastered the intangibles stuff, which wasn't a given after his initial public appearances and some of his offseason decisions.

Coen walked into Jacksonville with an uncommonly inexperienced coaching staff. In contrast to other coaches, who surrounded their staff with the ideal staff cocktail of youth and veteran savvy, Coen bet on first-timers. From the leader himself to assistants to position coaches, the Jaguars are filled with first-timers. That type of setup is exciting on paper, but frequently fails in practice – as past failures are a warning – because everybody is figuring out a their job in real-time. But he has managed to bring the entire group and all elements together.

After an initial strong beginning, there was a risk that the campaign would go off the track. A midseason collapse had the team stumbling once more. That's usually when coaches panic and change too much. Coen did not. Instead, he simplified the approach. Jacksonville stopped chasing home-run plays and started seeking consistent ones. The coach refocused the offense around his playmakers and the running game, and encouraged Lawrence to use his mobility more.

The outcomes are obvious. The Jags have won seven games in a row and will be the conference's number three seed. Coen gets the tiniest deduction in the rankings because he took over a talented roster, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that talent.

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

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

Moving on from a veteran, bringing in a different signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator might have ended the season in October. Rather, it shaped it. Through the middle point of the season, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player candidate. He has fallen away since that time, slipping to a lower rank in efficiency per pass attempt over the latter part of the season, placing him only one spot ahead of peers.

Still