How The Bizarre Campaign Broke the Conventional Coach of the Year Blueprint.
Typically, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor follows a straightforward pattern. It often acts as a kind of apology. Our apologies we misjudged your team in our pre-campaign predictions.
Theoretically, it's a clear-cut line: the coach who oversaw the biggest resurgence is handed the award. In reality, it fuels an yearly argument about expectations and whether we're genuinely rewarding excellent coaching or simply the greatest shock.
Yet the latest field is fundamentally unique. The list of candidates is unusually strong. It has been the year of turnarounds. The league has been messy, with reigning division winners falling away and recent strugglers ascending in unison. In an typical season, a coach guiding the Denver Broncos to the summit of the conference would make him the stone-cold front-runner. Yet in such a wild and fun year, he's up against several other elite candidates.
This is how the projected ballot ought to be structured.
5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, 11-5
Coach of the Year voters adore quarterbacks. They always have. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. When you fix a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.
Ben Johnson not only fixed his young quarterback; he's freed him. Given a proper system, the QB has been afforded the chance to showcase his rare talent. Since Week 9, the Chicago offense sit at number four in offensive EPA per play. That's not a brief surge – it's sustained performance. With Johnson, the quarterback has become increasingly decisive, far less reckless, and has eagerly submitted to the scheme rather than freelancing. It is an offense designed solely in Johnson's image: a physical run game, a heavy helping of play-action passes and a imaginative passing attack that springs wide-open targets consistently. Williams has taken advantage. And when clear throws haven't been there, he's been able to conjure magic out of nothing.
Johnson arrived to the Bears with a clear offensive vision. Almost every decision – overhauling the offensive line, featuring the tight ends, transforming the QB into a rhythm passer – has worked. That's uncommon for a first-year skipper. And it's rarer yet for a leader who walked into the organization with the immense hype Johnson did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the top name on the coaching market. But when it comes to selecting a leader, there are no sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has met the hype – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not only to be a scheme genius but the kind of culture builder that can breathe fresh energy into an franchise.
In a ordinary year, he would be the clear-cut favorite. Yet the current is not a normal season!
The area where his case runs a bit into trouble is on the defensive side. The Bears currently rank 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on takeaways, and takeaways are notoriously unreliable. Coaches can focus on ball disruption, but nobody can ensure it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offensive production is legitimate. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defense's heavy lifting. If not for a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be two wins worse off. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the foundation is in place for long-term success. But he comes up just short in this ranking.
4) Liam Coen, His Team, Their Record
The Jaguars' coach is in a similar situation to his counterpart. He's a fellow rookie leader who has orchestrated a rapid turnaround. During the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best overall football of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defense that now ranks fifth in the league in EPA per play.
Even more impressively, he has mastered the intangibles aspects, which wasn't a guarantee following his early press conference introduction and some of his offseason decisions.
Coen walked into the Jaguars with an uncommonly raw staff. In contrast to other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the ideal staff blend of new ideas and veteran savvy, he hired newbies. From the leader himself to assistants to position coaches, the Jags are filled with first-timers. That kind of setup is exciting on paper, but often collapses in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a new job in real-time. Yet he has pulled everyone and all elements into sync.
Following an early strong start, there was a possibility that the season would go off the rails. A mid-year setback caused the team wobbling once more. That's usually when coaches overcorrect. He didn't. Instead, he streamlined things. The offense stopped pursuing home-run plays and started hunting consistent ones. Coen refocused the attack around key players and the running game, and asked Lawrence to use his legs more often.
The outcomes are clear. The Jaguars have won multiple games in a row and will be the AFC's No 3 playoff seed. Coen receives the tiniest deduction in the rankings because he inherited a skilled roster, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that talent.
3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3
Each Strong of the Year narrative has a hinge moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback move.
Parting ways from a incumbent, signing a new signal-caller and partnering him with an innovative play-caller might have derailed the campaign in the early weeks. Rather, it made it. By the middle point of the year, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has cooled off after that time, dropping to a lower rank in EPA per pass attempt over the latter part of the season, putting him only one spot ahead of other QBs.
Still
