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Usually, the NFL's Head Coach of the Year honor follows a straightforward script. It frequently acts as a kind of mea culpa. Our apologies we misjudged your franchise in our pre-campaign forecasts.

In theory, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the coach who engineered the biggest resurgence is handed the prize. In reality, it creates an annual argument about expectations and whether we're truly rewarding excellent leadership or just the most shocking shock.

But the latest field is profoundly different. The group of contenders is unusually deep. It has been the campaign of turnarounds. The NFL has been messy, with recent conference winners declining and recent also-rans improving in unison. In an typical season, a coach guiding the his team to the top of the AFC would make him the clear front-runner. But in this turbulent and entertaining year, he's up against five other exceptional coaches.

This is how the hypothetical vote ought to be structured.

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

Coach of the Year selectors adore QBs. They always have. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. When you transform a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson didn't merely corrected his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. Within an ideal environment, the QB has been afforded the chance to showcase his rare ability. From midseason onward, the Bears sit at number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a hot streak – it's sustained dominance. Under his guidance, the quarterback has become increasingly decisive, less careless, and has willingly surrendered to the gameplan rather than going rogue. It is an attack built solely in the coach's vision: a physical run game, a heavy dose of play-action passes and a imaginative aerial game that springs wide-open receivers consistently. Williams has thrived. And when easy reads weren't there, he's been capable to spin magic from broken plays.

Johnson came to the Bears with a clear offensive philosophy. Almost every gamble – rebuilding the trenches, highlighting the pass-catchers, transforming the QB 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 building with the kind of pressure he did. For two straight offseasons, he was the top name on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a leader, there are no guarantees. Remarkably, he has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a scheme dork but the kind of leader that can inject fresh energy into an organization.

In a normal season, he would be the overwhelming choice. But the current is not a normal season!

The area where his case runs slightly into trouble is on the defensive side. The Bears presently rank 25th in defensive efficiency. They are living on takeaways, and turnovers are famously inconsistent. Coaches can stress ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee it. He is on the list because the offensive production is legitimate. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defensive work. With a couple bounces of the ball, the Bears would be two wins behind. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the foundation is established for long-term success. But Johnson comes up just short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

Coen is in a similar position to his counterpart. He's a fellow rookie leader who has masterminded a dramatic turnaround. Over the crucial final weeks of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest all-around football of his career. And he's also overseen the overhaul of a defense that now ranks number five in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

Even more impressively, Coen has mastered the intangibles aspects, which was not a guarantee following his initial press conference appearances and some of his preseason decisions.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an exceptionally inexperienced staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the perfect coaching cocktail of new ideas and experience, Coen hired first-timers. Starting with the leader on down to coordinators to position coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That kind of setup is intriguing on paper, but frequently collapses in practice – with other teams are a warning – because everyone is figuring out a new job on the fly. But Coen has pulled everyone and everything into sync.

After an early hot start, there was a risk that the campaign would go off the track. A midseason setback had the team stumbling once more. That's usually when leaders overcorrect. Coen did not. Rather, he streamlined the approach. The offense stopped pursuing home-run plays and started hunting sustainable ones. Coen refocused the attack around key players and the running game, and asked his QB to use his mobility more.

The results are evident. The Jaguars have won seven games in a row and will be the AFC's No 3 playoff seed. Coen gets the slightest deduction in the standings because he inherited a talented team, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that talent.

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

Every Coach of the Year narrative has a pivotal decision. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback decision.

Moving on from a veteran, signing a new signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator could have derailed the season in October. Instead, it defined it. By the middle point of the year, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player front-runner. He has cooled off after that hot streak, dropping to a lower rank in EPA per pass attempt over the latter part of the schedule, putting him only a single spot ahead of peers.

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