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Ordinarily, the NFL's Coach of the Year award follows a simple script. It commonly serves as a form of mea culpa. We regret we underestimated your team in our preseason predictions.

Theoretically, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the skipper who oversaw the biggest improvement wins the prize. In practice, it sparks an annual discussion about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly rewarding excellent leadership or simply the biggest surprise.

Yet the latest competition is profoundly unique. The list of candidates is unusually talented. It has been the year of turnarounds. The league has been unpredictable, with recent division champions fading and longtime strugglers rising in unison. In an typical year, a coach guiding the his team to the top of the AFC would make him the stone-cold favorite. Yet in such a wild and fun season, he's facing five other outstanding candidates.

Below is how the ideal ballot ought to be structured.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, 11-5

Voters for Coach of the Year voters adore quarterbacks. History shows this. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. If you fix a franchise QB, you're well on your way home.

The Bears' head coach didn't merely fixed his young quarterback; he's freed him. In the right ecosystem, Williams has been afforded the opportunity to demonstrate his special ability. From midseason onward, the Bears sit at fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a lucky run – it's prolonged performance. Under his guidance, the quarterback has become increasingly decisive, far less reckless, and has eagerly surrendered to the scheme rather than improvising. It is an attack designed solely in the coach's image: a bully-ball run game, a steady helping of play-action passes and a creative aerial game that creates wide receiver receivers consistently. Williams has capitalized. And when clear throws weren't available, he's been able to conjure magic from broken plays.

The coach came to the Bears with a specific offensive vision. Almost each decision – rebuilding the offensive line, highlighting the tight ends, turning the QB into a timing-based thrower – has paid off. This is rare for a first-year skipper. And it's rarer still for a coach who entered the organization with the kind of expectations he did. For two straight cycles, he was the most sought-after name on the head coaching market. However when it comes to selecting a leader, there are no sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has met the hype – and even exceeded them. He's proven not only to be a offensive genius but the kind of leader that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.

During a normal year, he would be the clear-cut choice. But this is not a typical year!

Where Johnson's case runs slightly into trouble is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense currently sit in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on takeaways, and turnovers are notoriously fickle. Defensive minds can stress ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. He is on the ballot because the offense is legitimate. He's ranked lower because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. If not for a few breaks of the ball, the team would be two wins behind. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is in place for long-term success. However Johnson falls short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

Coen is in a comparable situation to his counterpart. He's a fellow rookie head coach who has engineered a swift turnaround. Over the stretch run of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest all-around ball of his career. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defensive unit that now sits at number five in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

Even more impressively, he has nailed the leadership aspects, which wasn't a certainty following his early press conference introduction and some of his offseason moves.

The coach walked into Jacksonville with an uncommonly inexperienced staff. In contrast to Johnson, who packed their staff with the perfect staff cocktail of new ideas and veteran savvy, Coen bet on first-timers. From the head coach on down to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That kind of setup is exciting in theory, but often fails in reality – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everyone is learning a their job on the fly. But Coen has managed to bring everyone and all elements together.

After an early hot start, there was a possibility that the campaign would go off the rails. A midseason collapse caused the team stumbling once more. That's typically when leaders panic and change too much. He did not. Instead, he simplified the approach. Jacksonville stopped pursuing explosive plays and started seeking reliable ones. Coen refocused the offense around key players and the ground attack, and encouraged Lawrence to use his legs more.

The results are obvious. The Jaguars have won multiple games in a row and will be the AFC's number three playoff seed. Coen receives the slightest knock in the standings because he inherited a skilled roster, but he has proven he can get the most out of that roster.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, 13-3

Every Coach of the Year case has a defining moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB decision.

Moving on from a incumbent, bringing in a new signal-caller and partnering him with an new play-caller might have ended the season in the early weeks. Rather, it shaped it. By the mid point of the year, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player candidate. He has regressed after that hot streak, slipping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the schedule, placing him just a single spot ahead of other QBs.

Still