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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year honor follows a straightforward script. It often serves as a kind of apology. Our apologies we got wrong your squad in our pre-campaign forecasts.

In theory, it's a direct path: the coach who oversaw the biggest turnaround receives the prize. In practice, it sparks an yearly discussion about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely rewarding excellent coaching or merely the greatest surprise.

Yet the current race is profoundly different. The list of candidates is exceptionally talented. It has been the season of turnarounds. The league has been chaotic, with recent conference champions falling away and longtime strugglers improving collectively. Under an normal year, a coach leading the Denver Broncos to the summit of the conference would make him the clear front-runner. But in this chaotic and thrilling season, he's up against multiple other elite candidates.

Here is how the ideal vote ought to be structured.

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

Voters for Coach of the Year voters love QBs. History shows this. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. When you solve a franchise QB, you're well on your way home.

The Bears' head coach hasn't just corrected Caleb Williams; he's unleashed him. Given a proper environment, Williams has been afforded the chance to showcase his otherworldly ability. From Week 9, the Chicago offense rank number four in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a hot streak – it's sustained excellence. With Johnson, Williams has become increasingly decisive, far less careless, and has eagerly surrendered to the scheme instead of improvising. It is an offense built solely in Johnson's image: a bully-ball ground attack, a consistent dose of play-action passes and a innovative passing attack that creates wide-open receivers consistently. The QB has capitalized. And when openings weren't there, he's been capable to conjure magic out of nothing.

The coach arrived to the Bears with a defined offensive vision. Almost every gamble – rebuilding the trenches, highlighting the pass-catchers, transforming Williams into a timing-based thrower – has worked. That's uncommon for a first-year head coach. And it's rarer yet for a coach who entered the organization with the level of expectations Johnson did. For two straight offseasons, he was the top candidate on the coaching carousel. However when it comes to selecting a leader, there are no guarantees. Somehow, Johnson has lived up to the hype – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not only to be a scheme wizard but the type of leader that can breathe new life into an franchise.

During a typical year, Johnson would be the runaway favorite. Yet the current isn't a normal season!

The area where Johnson's case runs a bit into trouble is on defense. The Chicago defense currently rank 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on turnovers, and takeaways are famously unreliable. Defensive minds can stress ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offensive production is sustainable. He's not higher because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's heavy lifting. With a few bounces of the ball, the Bears would be several wins worse off. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the core is established for long-term success. But he comes up short here.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4

Coen is in a comparable position to Johnson. He's a fellow rookie head coach who has masterminded a dramatic resurgence. During the stretch run of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest overall ball of his career. And he's also spearheaded the transformation of a defensive unit that now ranks number five in the league in EPA per play.

Even more impressively, he has mastered the off-field aspects, which was not a guarantee after his initial public introduction and some of his offseason decisions.

The coach took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally inexperienced staff. In contrast to Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the ideal coaching cocktail of new ideas and veteran savvy, Coen hired first-timers. From the head coach on down to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That type of setup is intriguing in theory, but often fails in practice – as past failures are a warning – because everyone is learning a new job in real-time. Yet he has managed to bring the entire group and everything into sync.

After an early strong start, there was a possibility that the season would go off the track. A midseason setback caused the team stumbling again. That's typically when leaders overcorrect. Coen didn't. Instead, he streamlined things. The offense stopped chasing home-run plays and started hunting reliable ones. Coen recentered the attack around key players and the running game, and encouraged Lawrence to use his legs more.

The outcomes are clear. The Jaguars have won seven games in a row and will be the AFC's No 3 seed. He receives the tiniest knock in the rankings because he inherited a skilled roster, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that roster.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3

Every Strong of the Year narrative has a hinge moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback move.

Moving on from a incumbent, bringing in a new signal-caller and pairing him with an new play-caller might have derailed the campaign in October. Rather, it defined it. By the mid point of the season, the new QB was an MVP contender. He has cooled off after that time, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the second half of the schedule, placing him only one place ahead of other QBs.

Still