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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year award adheres to a straightforward script. It commonly acts as a kind of mea culpa. We regret we underestimated your franchise in our preseason projections.

In theory, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the coach who orchestrated the largest improvement wins the prize. However, it sparks an annual debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely honoring excellent leadership or merely the greatest surprise.

But the current competition is profoundly unique. The list of nominees is unusually deep. It has been the year of turnarounds. The league has been unpredictable, with recent division winners declining and recent underperformers ascending together. During an normal season, a coach guiding the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the overwhelming front-runner. But in this turbulent and fun season, he's facing multiple other elite candidates.

Below is how the ideal ballot should be structured.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, His Team, 11-5

Coach of the Year voters love signal-callers. History shows this. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. Should you solve a quarterback, you're well on your way home.

Ben Johnson not only fixed his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. In the right system, the QB has been afforded the chance to demonstrate his special ability. Since midseason onward, the Bears rank fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's sustained performance. With his guidance, the quarterback has become more confident, far less careless, and has willingly surrendered to the system instead of going rogue. It is an attack constructed solely in the coach's image: a physical ground attack, a heavy helping of play-action passes and a imaginative passing attack that springs wide receiver receivers consistently. Williams has capitalized. And when easy reads weren't available, he's been capable to spin big plays out of broken plays.

Johnson arrived to Chicago with a clear offensive philosophy. Almost every bet – overhauling the offensive line, utilizing the tight ends, turning Williams into a timing-based passer – has succeeded. This is uncommon for a rookie head coach. And it's rarer yet for a leader who walked into the organization with the level of hype Johnson did. For two straight offseasons, he was the top name on the head coaching market. However when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has lived up to expectations – and even exceeded them. He's proven not only to be a scheme wizard but the kind of leader that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.

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

The area where Johnson's candidacy comes slightly unstuck is on the defensive side. The Bears presently sit 25th in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on takeaways, and takeaways are famously unreliable. Coaches can emphasise ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is sustainable. He's not higher because luck is doing too much of the defense's work. If not for a few breaks of the ball, the team would be several wins behind. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the core is established for sustained winning. However he falls short here.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar spot to his counterpart. He's another rookie leader who has orchestrated a swift resurgence. During the crucial final weeks of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest all-around ball 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 impressively, he has mastered the intangibles stuff, which was not a certainty after his early public introduction and some of his offseason decisions.

Coen walked into Jacksonville with an exceptionally raw coaching staff. In contrast to other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the ideal coaching blend of youth and veteran savvy, Coen hired first-timers. Starting with the leader on down to coordinators to position coaches, the Jaguars are filled with rookies. That kind of setup is intriguing in theory, but often collapses in practice – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everyone is learning a new job in real-time. Yet he has managed to bring the entire group and everything together.

After an initial strong start, there was a risk that the season would veer off the rails. A midseason collapse caused the Jags wobbling once more. That's usually when leaders overcorrect. He did not. Instead, he streamlined things. The offense stopped pursuing home-run answers and started hunting reliable ones. The coach refocused the offense around key players and the ground attack, and asked his QB to use his mobility more often.

The outcomes are obvious. The Jags have won multiple games consecutively and will be the conference's No 3 playoff seed. He gets the tiniest deduction in the rankings because he took over a talented team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that roster.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, 13-3

Each Strong of the Year argument has a pivotal decision. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB decision.

Moving on from a veteran, signing a new signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative play-caller might have derailed the campaign in October. Rather, it shaped it. By the middle point of the year, the new QB was an MVP candidate. He has cooled off since that time, slipping to 23rd in efficiency per dropback over the second half of the schedule, putting him just one place ahead of peers.

Still