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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year award adheres to a straightforward pattern. It frequently functions as a kind of apology. We regret we misjudged your franchise in our pre-campaign forecasts.

Theoretically, it's a clear-cut line: the coach who oversaw the largest improvement is handed the award. However, it creates an annual discussion about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely honoring excellent coaching or simply the greatest shock.

However this year's field is distinctly different. The group of candidates is unusually talented. It has been the campaign of resurgences. The league has been chaotic, with reigning conference champions declining and longtime strugglers rising together. During an typical season, a coach guiding the Denver Broncos to the summit of the AFC would make him the clear favorite. But in such a turbulent and entertaining year, he's facing five other elite candidates.

Below is how the hypothetical ballot should shake out.

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

Coach of the Year selectors adore signal-callers. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. If you solve a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach didn't merely corrected his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. In the right environment, the QB has been afforded the chance to showcase his special talent. From Week 9, the Chicago offense rank fourth in offensive EPA per play. That's not a brief surge – it's prolonged performance. With Johnson, Williams has become increasingly confident, far less reckless, and has willingly submitted to the gameplan instead of improvising. It is an attack built solely in the coach's vision: a bully-ball ground attack, a consistent helping of play-action passes and a imaginative aerial game that creates wide-open targets consistently. The QB has thrived. And when clear throws haven't been there, he's been capable to spin big plays out of broken plays.

Johnson arrived to the Bears with a defined offensive philosophy. Almost every bet – rebuilding the offensive line, highlighting the pass-catchers, turning the QB into a rhythm passer – has worked. That's rare for a first-year skipper. And it's rarer yet for a coach who walked into the building with the immense hype Johnson did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the top candidate on the coaching carousel. However when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are no guarantees. Somehow, Johnson has lived up to expectations – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not just to be a offensive dork but the kind of leader that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.

In a ordinary season, he would be the runaway choice. But this isn't a typical season!

The area where Johnson's candidacy runs a bit into trouble is on the defensive side. The Bears presently sit in the bottom third 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. He is on the list because the offense is legitimate. He's not higher because variance is doing too much of the defense's work. If not for a couple bounces of the ball, the team would be several victories worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is established for long-term winning. But he comes up just short here.

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

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar position to Johnson. He's a fellow first-time leader who has engineered a rapid resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the most complete all-around football of his career. And he's also overseen the transformation of a defensive unit that now sits at fifth in the league in EPA per play.

Even more impressively, he has nailed the intangibles aspects, which was not a certainty following his initial public introduction and some of his preseason moves.

The coach took over Jacksonville with an uncommonly raw coaching staff. Unlike other coaches, who packed themselves with the perfect coaching blend of youth and veteran savvy, he trusted newbies. Starting with the head coach on down to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jags are filled with rookies. That kind of setup is exciting on paper, but frequently fails in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a new job in real-time. But he has pulled everyone and all elements together.

Following an early hot start, there was a chance that the season would veer off the track. A midseason collapse caused the team wobbling again. That's usually when coaches panic and change too much. Coen did not. Rather, he streamlined the approach. The offense stopped pursuing home-run answers and started seeking sustainable ones. Coen recentered the offense around key players and the running game, and encouraged Lawrence to use his legs more often.

The outcomes are clear. The Jaguars have won multiple games in a row and will be the conference's number three playoff seed. He gets the tiniest deduction in the standings because he took over a talented roster, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that talent.

3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, His Team, 13-3

Every Strong of the Year case has a hinge moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB decision.

Moving on from a incumbent, signing a new signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator could have derailed the season in the early weeks. Instead, it made it. By the middle point of the year, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player front-runner. He has cooled off since that hot streak, slipping to 23rd in EPA per dropback over the second half of the schedule, placing him just a single spot ahead of peers.

Still