How This Bizarre Campaign Broke the Traditional Coach of the Year Mould.
Usually, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor follows a simple pattern. It commonly serves as a type of mea culpa. Our apologies we underestimated your team in our preseason projections.
Theoretically, it's a clear-cut path: the coach who engineered the biggest turnaround is handed the award. In reality, it creates an yearly argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely rewarding excellent coaching or simply the biggest surprise.
But the latest competition is distinctly different. The list of contenders is exceptionally deep. It has been the season of resurgences. The league has been chaotic, with reigning conference winners declining and longtime underperformers ascending together. In an normal year, Sean Payton guiding the Denver Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the stone-cold front-runner. Yet in such a chaotic and thrilling year, he's up against several other exceptional candidates.
Here is how the projected ballot ought to be structured.
5) Ben Johnson, His Team, Their Record
Voters for Coach of the Year selectors love quarterbacks. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. If you solve a franchise QB, you're halfway home.
The Bears' head coach hasn't just corrected Caleb Williams; he's unlocked him. Within an ideal ecosystem, Williams has been given the chance to display his rare talent. From Week 9, the Bears rank fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a lucky run – it's consistent performance. With Johnson, the quarterback has become more confident, far less careless, and has willingly surrendered to the scheme instead of freelancing. It is an attack designed solely in the coach's vision: a physical run game, a heavy helping of play-action passes and a imaginative passing attack that creates wide-open targets consistently. Williams has capitalized. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been able to create magic out of broken plays.
Johnson arrived to the Bears with a clear offensive vision. Virtually every gamble – overhauling the offensive line, highlighting the tight ends, turning Williams into a timing-based passer – has paid off. That's rare for a first-year head coach. And it's even more uncommon yet for a leader who entered the organization with the immense pressure Johnson did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the top candidate on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are no sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has met the hype – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not just to be a offensive dork but the kind of leader that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.
During a ordinary year, Johnson would be the runaway favorite. But the current is not a normal year!
Where his case runs a bit unstuck is on defense. The Bears currently rank 25th in defensive success rate. They are surviving on takeaways, and takeaways are notoriously inconsistent. Defensive minds can stress ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offense is legitimate. He's not higher because luck is doing an outsized share of the defensive work. With a couple bounces of the ball, the Bears would be several victories behind. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the core is established for long-term winning. But he falls just short here.
4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4
Coen is in a comparable spot to his counterpart. He's a fellow rookie leader who has engineered a dramatic resurgence. During the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best overall ball of his career. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defensive unit that now sits at number five in the NFL in EPA per play.
Even more notably, he has excelled at the leadership aspects, which was not a certainty after his initial public appearances and some of his preseason decisions.
The coach took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally raw coaching staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the ideal staff cocktail of youth and veteran savvy, Coen bet on first-timers. Starting with the leader himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are filled with first-timers. That type of setup is intriguing in theory, but frequently collapses in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a new job on the fly. But he has managed to bring everyone and everything together.
After an early hot beginning, there was a risk that the campaign would go off the track. A midseason setback caused the team wobbling again. That's usually when leaders overcorrect. He did not. Rather, he streamlined things. The offense stopped chasing home-run answers and started seeking reliable ones. Coen recentered the offense around key players and the ground attack, and encouraged Lawrence to use his legs more often.
The results are clear. The Jaguars have won seven games consecutively and will be the conference's No 3 seed. Coen gets the slightest deduction in the standings because he inherited a skilled roster, but he has proven he can maximize that talent.
3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3
Every Coach of the Year narrative has a defining decision. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB move.
Parting ways from a veteran, bringing in a new quarterback and pairing him with an new offensive coordinator might have derailed the season in the early weeks. Rather, it defined it. By the middle point of the year, the new QB was an MVP contender. He has fallen away since that time, dropping to 23rd in efficiency per pass attempt over the second half of the schedule, putting him only a single place ahead of peers.
Still
