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Usually, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year trophy follows a straightforward pattern. It frequently acts as a kind of apology. Our apologies we misjudged your squad in our preseason forecasts.

On paper, it's a clear-cut line: the coach who engineered the biggest improvement receives the prize. However, it sparks an annual discussion about preseason outlooks and whether we're actually honoring excellent leadership or simply the greatest surprise.

But this year's competition is fundamentally different. The pool of nominees is remarkably talented. It has been the season of comebacks. The NFL has been messy, with recent conference winners declining and recent underperformers rising together. In an normal season, Sean Payton guiding the his team to the summit of the conference would make him the overwhelming favorite. Yet in such a chaotic and entertaining year, he's facing five other elite coaches.

This is how the projected vote should look.

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

Voters for Coach of the Year selectors adore QBs. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. If you solve a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson didn't merely fixed his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. In the right ecosystem, the QB has been given the opportunity to demonstrate his special talent. From Week 9, the Chicago offense sit at fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a lucky run – it's sustained excellence. Under Johnson, Williams has become more confident, far less careless, and has willingly surrendered to the system instead of freelancing. It is an attack built solely in Johnson's image: a bully-ball run game, a heavy dose of play-action and a imaginative aerial game that creates wide receiver targets everywhere. Williams has taken advantage. And when easy reads haven't been available, he's been able to spin magic out of broken plays.

Johnson arrived to Chicago with a defined offensive vision. Virtually each bet – overhauling the trenches, featuring the tight ends, transforming the QB into a rhythm thrower – has paid off. That's uncommon for a first-year skipper. And it's even more uncommon yet for a coach who entered the organization with the level of pressure Johnson did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the top name on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are zero sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has lived up to the hype – and even surpassed them. He's proven not only to be a scheme wizard but the type of leader that can inject fresh energy into an organization.

During a ordinary year, Johnson would be the clear-cut choice. Yet the current is not a normal campaign!

The area where Johnson's case comes slightly into trouble is on defense. The Bears presently sit 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on takeaways, and turnovers are famously unreliable. Coaches can stress ball disruption, but no one can ensure it. Johnson is on the list because the offensive production is legitimate. He's not higher because luck is doing too much of the defense's heavy lifting. If not for a few bounces of the ball, the Bears would be two wins worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the foundation is established for sustained winning. But he comes up just short here.

4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, His Team, Their Record

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar situation to his counterpart. He's another first-time head coach who has orchestrated a rapid resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best all-around 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 wasn't a certainty following his early press conference introduction and some of his preseason decisions.

Coen took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally inexperienced staff. In contrast to other coaches, who packed themselves with the ideal staff cocktail of new ideas and experience, he trusted first-timers. From the head coach on down to assistants to position coaches, the Jaguars are filled with first-timers. That kind of setup is exciting in theory, but often collapses in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a new job on the fly. Yet Coen has managed to bring the entire group and all elements together.

Following an early hot beginning, there was a chance that the season would go off the track. A midseason collapse caused the Jags wobbling once more. That's usually when leaders panic and change too much. Coen did not. Rather, he simplified things. The offense stopped pursuing explosive plays and started seeking reliable ones. The coach recentered the attack around key players and the ground attack, and asked his QB to use his legs more often.

The results are evident. The Jaguars have won multiple games consecutively and will be the AFC's number three playoff seed. Coen receives the slightest deduction in the rankings because he inherited a talented roster, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that talent.

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

Each Coach of the Year narrative has a pivotal moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his quarterback decision.

Parting ways from a incumbent, signing a new quarterback and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator might have ended the season in the early weeks. Instead, it made it. By the mid point of the season, the acquisition was an MVP front-runner. He has fallen away since that hot streak, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the season, placing him just one place ahead of other QBs.

Still