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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year trophy adheres to a simple formula. It often serves as a type of apology. Our apologies we got wrong your team in our pre-campaign predictions.

Theoretically, it's a clear-cut path: the skipper who engineered the biggest resurgence receives the prize. In reality, it fuels an yearly argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're actually honoring excellent coaching or simply the most shocking shock.

But the latest field is profoundly different. The group of nominees is exceptionally strong. It has been the campaign of comebacks. The league has been messy, with reigning conference champions fading and longtime underperformers rising together. Under an ordinary season, a coach guiding the Denver Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the clear front-runner. But in such a wild and fun season, he's up against several other outstanding candidates.

This is how the ideal ballot ought to look.

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

Coach of the Year voters adore quarterbacks. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. If you fix a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson didn't merely fixed his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. Given a proper system, Williams has been given the chance to showcase his otherworldly ability. Since midseason onward, the Chicago offense rank number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a brief surge – it's prolonged dominance. Under his guidance, the quarterback has become more confident, less careless, and has willingly submitted to the scheme rather than going rogue. It is an attack constructed entirely in the coach's image: a physical run game, a consistent dose of play-action passes and a creative passing attack that frees wide-open targets consistently. Williams has taken advantage. And when easy reads weren't available, he's been able to spin magic out of broken plays.

Johnson came to the Bears with a defined offensive philosophy. Virtually every bet – rebuilding the trenches, highlighting the pass-catchers, turning the QB into a rhythm passer – has paid off. This is rare for a first-year skipper. And it's even more uncommon yet for a leader who entered the building with the kind of pressure he did. For two straight cycles, he was the most sought-after name on the coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a leader, there are zero sure things. Somehow, Johnson has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's proven not only to be a offensive wizard but the type of culture builder that can inject new life into an organization.

During a ordinary year, he would be the clear-cut favorite. Yet this is not a normal year!

Where Johnson's candidacy comes a bit unstuck is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense currently sit 25th in defensive success rate. They are surviving on turnovers, and takeaways are notoriously unreliable. Defensive minds can emphasise creating turnovers, but nobody can guarantee it. He is on the ballot because the offense is real. He's not higher because variance is doing an outsized share of the defensive work. If not for a couple bounces of the ball, the Bears would be two wins worse off. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the foundation is in place for long-term winning. However Johnson falls short here.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

Coen is in a similar situation to Johnson. He's a fellow first-time leader who has engineered a swift turnaround. During the crucial final weeks of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the most complete overall football of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the remaking of a defensive unit that now ranks number five in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

Even more impressively, Coen has nailed the off-field stuff, which was not a guarantee after his initial public introduction and some of his preseason moves.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an uncommonly raw coaching staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the perfect staff cocktail of youth and veteran savvy, he trusted newbies. Starting with the head coach on down to assistants to position coaches, the Jaguars are filled with rookies. That type of approach is exciting in theory, but frequently collapses in practice – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everybody is figuring out a their job on the fly. But Coen has managed to bring everyone and everything together.

Following an early strong start, there was a possibility that the campaign would go off the rails. A midseason collapse caused the Jags stumbling once more. That's typically when coaches panic and change too much. Coen didn't. Rather, he streamlined things. Jacksonville stopped chasing home-run plays and started hunting consistent ones. The coach recentered the offense around his playmakers and the ground attack, and encouraged his QB to use his legs more often.

The results are evident. The Jaguars have won multiple games in a row and will be the AFC's No 3 seed. Coen receives the tiniest deduction 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, Their Record

Every Coach of the Year argument has a pivotal moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB decision.

Moving on from a incumbent, bringing in a different signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative play-caller could have ended the campaign in the early weeks. Rather, it defined it. By the mid point of the year, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has cooled off since that hot streak, slipping to 23rd in EPA per pass attempt over the second half of the schedule, placing him only a single place ahead of peers.

Still