The Way This Bizarre Campaign Broke the Traditional Coach of the Year Blueprint.
Ordinarily, the NFL's Head Coach of the Year honor follows a simple pattern. It commonly serves as a kind of mea culpa. Our apologies we underestimated your franchise in our preseason predictions.
On paper, it's a direct line: the skipper who oversaw the biggest resurgence receives the award. In reality, it creates an yearly debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely honoring superior leadership or just the most shocking upset.
But this year's field is fundamentally unique. The pool of candidates is exceptionally deep. It has been the season of resurgences. The league has been chaotic, with reigning division winners fading and longtime underperformers rising in unison. Under an ordinary year, Sean Payton leading the Denver Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the clear front-runner. Yet in this turbulent and fun season, he's up against multiple other exceptional coaches.
Below is how the hypothetical ballot could look.
5) Ben Johnson, His Team, 11-5
Coach of the Year voters adore QBs. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. When you transform a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.
Ben Johnson hasn't just fixed his young quarterback; he's freed him. Given a proper ecosystem, Williams has been afforded the opportunity to showcase his rare talent. Since midseason onward, the Bears rank fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's prolonged dominance. With Johnson, the quarterback has become more decisive, less careless, and has eagerly surrendered to the gameplan rather than freelancing. It is an offense constructed entirely in the coach's vision: a physical run game, a steady dose of play-action passes and a imaginative aerial game that springs wide-open targets consistently. Williams has taken advantage. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been capable to create big plays out of broken plays.
The coach arrived to the Bears with a defined offensive blueprint. Virtually every gamble – rebuilding the offensive line, highlighting the pass-catchers, turning the QB into a rhythm passer – has worked. That's rare for a first-year skipper. And it's rarer yet for a leader who walked into the building with the level of expectations Johnson did. For two straight cycles, he was the most sought-after candidate on the coaching market. However when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are zero guarantees. Somehow, Johnson has met expectations – and even exceeded them. He's proven not just to be a scheme genius but the type of culture builder that can inject new life into an organization.
During a normal year, he would be the overwhelming choice. Yet the current isn't a normal campaign!
Where his candidacy comes slightly unstuck is on defense. The Chicago defense presently sit 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on turnovers, and turnovers are notoriously unreliable. Defensive minds can emphasise ball disruption, but nobody can ensure it. He is on the ballot because the offense is real. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defensive work. If not for a few bounces of the ball, the team would be two wins worse off. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is in place for long-term winning. However he falls just short here.
4) Liam Coen, His Team, Their Record
Coen is in a similar situation to his counterpart. He's a fellow rookie head coach who has masterminded a rapid turnaround. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the most complete all-around ball of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the remaking of a defense that now ranks fifth in the league in EPA per play.
Even more notably, Coen has excelled at the intangibles aspects, which was not a certainty following his initial press conference introduction and some of his preseason decisions.
The coach took over the Jaguars with an exceptionally inexperienced coaching staff. In contrast to Johnson, who packed themselves with the perfect coaching mix of youth and veteran savvy, Coen bet on newbies. From the head coach himself to coordinators to position coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with first-timers. That kind of approach is intriguing on paper, but frequently fails in reality – as past failures are a warning – because everybody is figuring out a their job in real-time. But Coen has pulled the entire group and all elements together.
After an initial strong beginning, there was a risk that the campaign would veer off the track. A mid-year collapse had the Jags wobbling once more. That's typically when coaches overcorrect. He didn't. Rather, he streamlined the approach. The offense stopped chasing home-run answers and started hunting consistent ones. The coach recentered the attack around his playmakers and the running game, and asked his QB to use his legs more.
The outcomes are clear. The Jags have won multiple games consecutively and will be the conference's No 3 seed. Coen gets the slightest deduction in the standings because he inherited a talented team, but he has proven he can get the most out of that roster.
3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, 13-3
Each Strong of the Year case has a defining moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB choice.
Moving on from a incumbent, signing a different quarterback and pairing him with an new play-caller could have ended the season in the early weeks. Instead, it shaped it. By the mid point of the year, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player front-runner. He has fallen away since that hot streak, slipping to a lower rank in EPA per dropback over the second half of the season, putting him just a single place ahead of peers.
Still
