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Usually, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year honor follows a simple script. It commonly functions as a kind of mea culpa. Our apologies we got wrong your team in our preseason forecasts.

On paper, it's a direct trajectory: the coach who orchestrated the largest turnaround wins the award. In practice, it sparks an yearly argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're actually honoring superior coaching or simply the biggest surprise.

Yet the current competition is fundamentally different. The list of contenders is remarkably talented. It has been the year of comebacks. The league has been unpredictable, with reigning division champions falling away and recent strugglers improving together. Under an normal year, Sean Payton leading the his team to the top of the AFC would make him the overwhelming favorite. Yet in such a turbulent and fun season, he's competing with five other exceptional candidates.

Here is how the ideal ballot ought to shake out.

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

Voters for Coach of the Year voters are fascinated by signal-callers. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. If you solve a franchise QB, you're well on your way to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach hasn't just fixed Caleb Williams; he's unleashed him. Within an ideal environment, Williams has been given the opportunity to demonstrate his otherworldly ability. Since Week 9, the Chicago offense sit at fourth in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a hot streak – it's prolonged dominance. With Johnson, Williams has become more confident, less careless, and has willingly submitted to the scheme rather than going rogue. It is an attack designed solely in Johnson's image: a bully-ball run game, a consistent helping of play-action and a imaginative passing attack that springs wide receiver targets consistently. Williams has taken advantage. And when openings haven't been there, he's been capable to spin magic out of nothing.

Johnson arrived to Chicago with a defined offensive philosophy. Almost every gamble – overhauling the offensive line, utilizing the pass-catchers, turning the QB into a rhythm passer – has worked. That's rare for a rookie skipper. And it's rarer still for a coach who entered the organization with the kind of expectations he did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the top name on the coaching carousel. But when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are zero guarantees. Somehow, Johnson has met expectations – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not just to be a offensive wizard but the type of culture builder that can breathe fresh energy into an franchise.

In a normal year, he 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 Chicago defense currently rank in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are living on takeaways, and takeaways are notoriously unreliable. Defensive minds can stress ball disruption, but nobody can ensure it. He is on the list because the offense is sustainable. He's ranked lower because variance is doing too much of the defensive heavy lifting. If not for a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be two wins worse off. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is established for long-term winning. But he comes up just short in this ranking.

4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, His Team, 12-4

Coen is in a comparable spot to Johnson. He's a fellow rookie head coach who has engineered a swift turnaround. During the crucial final weeks of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the most complete overall football of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the remaking of a defensive unit that now ranks fifth in the league in EPA per play.

Even more impressively, he has mastered the intangibles aspects, which was not a given after his early press conference appearances and some of his preseason decisions.

Coen took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally raw staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the ideal coaching mix of new ideas and experience, he bet on first-timers. From the leader himself to assistants to position coaches, the Jags are stocked with rookies. That type of approach is intriguing on paper, but frequently collapses in practice – as past failures are a warning – because everybody is learning a their job in real-time. But he has pulled the entire group and all elements into sync.

After an initial hot start, there was a chance that the campaign would go off the rails. A midseason collapse caused the team stumbling again. That's typically when leaders panic and change too much. Coen did not. Rather, he simplified the approach. The offense stopped chasing home-run answers and started seeking reliable ones. Coen refocused the offense around his playmakers and the running game, and encouraged Lawrence to use his legs more often.

The outcomes are clear. The Jags have won multiple games consecutively and will be the AFC's No 3 playoff seed. Coen gets the slightest knock in the rankings because he took over a talented roster, but he has proven he can get the most out of that talent.

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

Each Coach of the Year case has a hinge decision. For the Seahawks coach, it was his quarterback decision.

Parting ways from a veteran, signing a new signal-caller and partnering him with an innovative offensive coordinator could have derailed the season in the early weeks. Rather, it shaped it. By the middle point of the season, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has fallen away after that hot streak, slipping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the second half of the season, placing him only a single place ahead of other QBs.

Still