How The Unusual Campaign Shattered the Conventional Coach of the Year Blueprint.
Ordinarily, the NFL's Coach of the Year honor adheres to a simple script. It frequently serves as a form of apology. Our apologies we misjudged your team in our preseason forecasts.
On paper, it's a clear-cut path: the coach who oversaw the biggest turnaround is handed the award. In reality, it sparks an yearly discussion about expectations and whether we're genuinely rewarding superior leadership or merely the biggest shock.
Yet the current competition is distinctly unique. The pool of contenders is remarkably strong. It has been the season of resurgences. The league has been messy, with reigning conference winners falling away and recent underperformers rising collectively. During an normal season, Sean Payton guiding the Denver Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the stone-cold favorite. But in such a wild and entertaining year, he's competing with several other outstanding candidates.
This is how the projected vote should shake out.
5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, 11-5
Coach of the Year voters are fascinated by signal-callers. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. Should you fix a quarterback, you're well on your way to winning the award.
Ben Johnson didn't merely corrected his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. Within an ideal ecosystem, the QB has been given the opportunity to display his otherworldly ability. From Week 9, the Bears rank number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's sustained dominance. With his guidance, Williams has become more confident, far less reckless, and has willingly submitted to the system instead of going rogue. It is an offense designed entirely in Johnson's vision: a bully-ball run game, a consistent helping of play-action and a imaginative aerial game that creates wide-open targets all over the field. Williams has capitalized. And when easy reads weren't available, he's been capable to spin magic out of nothing.
Johnson came to Chicago with a clear offensive philosophy. Almost each gamble – rebuilding the offensive line, utilizing the tight ends, transforming Williams into a rhythm passer – has worked. That's rare for a first-year skipper. And it's even more uncommon still for a coach who walked into the building with the kind of expectations he did. For two straight offseasons, he was the most sought-after name on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero sure things. Remarkably, he has met expectations – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not only to be a scheme genius but the type of culture builder that can breathe new life into an franchise.
During a normal season, Johnson would be the runaway favorite. Yet this is not a normal campaign!
Where his case runs slightly into trouble is on defense. The Bears presently rank in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on takeaways, and takeaways are notoriously unreliable. Defensive minds can stress ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is legitimate. He's not higher because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. If not for a couple bounces of the ball, the Bears would be several wins worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the foundation is in place for sustained success. However he falls just short in this ranking.
4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record
Coen is in a similar situation to Johnson. He's another first-time head coach who has engineered a rapid turnaround. Over the stretch run of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest all-around football of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defensive unit that now ranks number five in the league in Expected Points Added per play.
Even more impressively, Coen has excelled at the intangibles aspects, which wasn't a certainty following his early public appearances and some of his offseason decisions.
The coach walked into the Jaguars with an exceptionally inexperienced coaching staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded their staff with the perfect coaching mix of youth and experience, Coen hired newbies. Starting with the leader on down to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with first-timers. That type of setup is exciting in theory, but frequently collapses in reality – as past failures are a warning – because everyone is learning a new job in real-time. But Coen has managed to bring everyone and all elements together.
Following an initial hot beginning, there was a risk that the season would veer off the rails. A midseason collapse caused the team wobbling once more. That's typically when coaches panic and change too much. He did not. Instead, he simplified the approach. The offense stopped pursuing home-run plays and started hunting consistent ones. The coach refocused the attack around key players and the ground attack, and encouraged Lawrence to use his mobility more.
The results are clear. The Jags have won multiple games consecutively and will be the AFC's number three playoff seed. Coen gets the slightest knock in the standings because he inherited a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that talent.
3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, 13-3
Every Coach of the Year argument has a hinge decision. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback move.
Moving on from a veteran, bringing in a new quarterback and partnering him with an innovative play-caller could have ended the campaign in the early weeks. Rather, it defined it. Through the middle point of the season, the new QB was an MVP front-runner. He has cooled off since that hot streak, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the second half of the season, putting him just one spot ahead of other QBs.
Still
