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Typically, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor adheres to a simple formula. It frequently functions as a type of apology. Our apologies we misjudged your squad in our pre-campaign forecasts.

Theoretically, it's a direct line: the skipper who orchestrated the largest resurgence receives the prize. In practice, it fuels an annual argument about expectations and whether we're genuinely honoring excellent coaching or merely the biggest surprise.

Yet this year's field is fundamentally different. The pool of contenders is remarkably strong. It has been the campaign of resurgences. The league has been chaotic, with recent division winners declining and recent strugglers rising collectively. During an normal season, a coach guiding the Denver Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the stone-cold favorite. Yet in such a chaotic and fun year, he's facing multiple other outstanding candidates.

Here is how the ideal ballot could be structured.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, Chicago Bears, 11-5

Coach of the Year voters are fascinated by quarterbacks. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. If you fix a quarterback, you're halfway home.

The Bears' head coach hasn't just corrected Caleb Williams; he's freed him. Within an ideal ecosystem, the QB has been afforded the opportunity to display his otherworldly talent. From Week 9, the Chicago offense rank number four in offensive EPA per play. That's not a brief surge – it's consistent excellence. Under his guidance, the quarterback has become increasingly decisive, far less reckless, and has willingly surrendered to the gameplan instead of freelancing. It is an offense built entirely in the coach's vision: a bully-ball ground attack, a heavy helping of play-action and a innovative aerial game that springs wide-open targets everywhere. Williams has capitalized. And when openings haven't been there, he's been capable to create big plays out of nothing.

The coach came to Chicago with a clear offensive philosophy. Virtually every bet – rebuilding the offensive line, featuring the pass-catchers, turning the QB into a rhythm thrower – has paid off. That's uncommon for a first-year head coach. And it's rarer still for a coach who entered the building with the immense expectations Johnson did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the hottest candidate on the coaching carousel. However when it comes to selecting a leader, there are no sure things. Remarkably, he has met expectations – and even exceeded them. He's proven not just to be a offensive genius but the kind of culture builder that can inject new life into an franchise.

During a normal season, he would be the runaway choice. Yet the current is not a normal campaign!

The area where his case comes a bit unstuck is on defense. The Chicago defense currently sit in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on turnovers, and turnovers are famously unreliable. Defensive minds can stress ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee it. He is on the ballot because the offensive production is sustainable. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defensive heavy lifting. With a few breaks of the ball, the Bears would be two wins worse off. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the foundation is established for long-term success. But he falls short in this ranking.

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

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable spot to his counterpart. He's another first-time leader who has masterminded a dramatic turnaround. During the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best all-around ball of his professional life. And he's also overseen the transformation of a defensive unit that now ranks number five in the NFL in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more impressively, Coen has excelled at the intangibles stuff, which was not a given after his early press conference appearances and some of his offseason decisions.

Coen took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally inexperienced coaching staff. Unlike Johnson, who surrounded themselves with the ideal staff blend of youth and veteran savvy, he bet on first-timers. From the head coach on down to assistants to position coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with first-timers. That kind of setup is intriguing in theory, but frequently fails in reality – as past failures are a warning – because everyone is learning a new job on the fly. But he has pulled the entire group and everything into sync.

Following an initial hot start, there was a risk that the campaign would veer off the track. A midseason collapse caused the team stumbling once more. That's typically when leaders overcorrect. He did not. Rather, he streamlined the approach. Jacksonville stopped chasing home-run answers and started seeking reliable ones. The coach refocused the offense around his playmakers and the running game, and encouraged Lawrence to use his mobility more often.

The results are evident. The Jags have won multiple games consecutively and will be the conference's number three seed. Coen gets the tiniest deduction in the rankings because he inherited a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that roster.

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

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

Moving on from a veteran, signing a different quarterback and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator might have ended the campaign in October. Instead, it defined it. By the mid point of the year, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has fallen away after that time, slipping to a lower rank in efficiency per pass attempt over the latter part of the schedule, placing him just one spot ahead of peers.

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