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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year trophy follows a straightforward pattern. It often acts as a kind of apology. We regret we misjudged your team in our pre-campaign forecasts.

In theory, it's a direct trajectory: the skipper who engineered the biggest resurgence wins the award. In practice, it fuels an annual argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely rewarding excellent leadership or merely the greatest surprise.

Yet the latest competition is fundamentally different. The pool of contenders is unusually talented. It has been the campaign of resurgences. The league has been chaotic, with reigning division winners fading and recent strugglers ascending together. During an ordinary season, a coach guiding the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the clear favorite. But in such a wild and thrilling season, he's competing with multiple other outstanding candidates.

Below is how the ideal vote ought to look.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, His Team, Their Record

Coach of the Year selectors adore quarterbacks. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. If you fix a quarterback, you're well on your way home.

Ben Johnson didn't merely fixed Caleb Williams; he's freed him. Within an ideal system, Williams has been given the chance to display his rare ability. From midseason onward, the Bears rank fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's prolonged performance. Under Johnson, the quarterback has become more confident, less reckless, and has willingly surrendered to the system rather than going rogue. It is an attack built entirely in Johnson's image: a physical run game, a heavy helping of play-action passes and a creative aerial game that springs wide receiver targets consistently. Williams has thrived. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been capable to spin magic out of broken plays.

The coach arrived to the Bears with a clear offensive philosophy. Almost each gamble – overhauling the offensive line, featuring the tight ends, transforming Williams into a timing-based thrower – has paid off. That's rare for a rookie skipper. And it's rarer still for a coach who walked into the building with the kind of pressure Johnson did. For two straight cycles, he was the top name on the coaching market. But when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are no guarantees. Somehow, Johnson has met the hype – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a offensive dork but the kind of culture builder that can inject new life into an franchise.

In a typical year, Johnson would be the clear-cut favorite. Yet the current isn't a normal campaign!

The area where his case runs a bit into trouble is on defense. The Chicago defense presently rank in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on takeaways, and turnovers are notoriously unreliable. Coaches can emphasise ball disruption, but no one can ensure it. Johnson is on the list because the offensive production is real. He's ranked lower because variance is doing too much of the defense's heavy lifting. If not for a couple bounces of the ball, the team would be several wins worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is in place for sustained success. But he falls just short here.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, Their Record

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable situation to Johnson. He's a fellow first-time head coach who has orchestrated a swift resurgence. During the stretch run of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest overall football of his career. And he's also overseen the remaking of a defense that now ranks fifth in the league in EPA per play.

What's more notably, Coen has excelled at the off-field stuff, which wasn't a guarantee after his early press conference introduction and some of his offseason moves.

Coen walked into Jacksonville with an exceptionally inexperienced coaching staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the perfect coaching mix of youth and veteran savvy, he trusted first-timers. From the leader on down to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with rookies. That kind of approach is exciting in theory, but frequently collapses in reality – with other teams are a warning – because everyone is figuring out a their job in real-time. But Coen has pulled the entire group and all elements into sync.

Following an initial hot start, there was a chance that the campaign would go off the rails. A mid-year setback caused the team wobbling once more. That's typically when coaches overcorrect. He didn't. Instead, he simplified things. Jacksonville stopped chasing home-run plays and started seeking sustainable ones. Coen recentered the offense around his playmakers and the ground attack, and asked Lawrence to use his mobility more often.

The results are clear. The Jags have won multiple games in a row and will be the conference's number three seed. Coen gets the slightest deduction in the standings because he took over a talented team, but he has proven he can maximize that roster.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3

Each Strong of the Year case has a defining decision. For the Seahawks coach, it was his quarterback move.

Moving on from a veteran, bringing in a new signal-caller and partnering him with an innovative play-caller could have derailed the season in October. Instead, it shaped it. Through the middle point of the season, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has cooled off after that time, dropping to 23rd in EPA per pass attempt over the second half of the season, placing him just one spot ahead of other QBs.

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