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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year trophy adheres to a simple formula. It often serves as a form of apology. Sorry we underestimated your team in our pre-campaign predictions.

On paper, it's a direct trajectory: the coach who orchestrated the largest turnaround is handed the prize. In reality, it creates an annual argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly honoring excellent leadership or simply the greatest surprise.

However this year's field is profoundly different. The pool of candidates is exceptionally deep. It has been the season of turnarounds. The NFL has been unpredictable, with recent conference winners fading and recent also-rans ascending collectively. Under an ordinary year, Sean Payton leading the Denver Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the clear front-runner. Yet in this wild and fun year, he's facing multiple other exceptional candidates.

Here is how the projected vote ought to look.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, 11-5

Voters for Coach of the Year voters love quarterbacks. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. When you solve a franchise QB, you're halfway home.

Ben Johnson didn't merely corrected Caleb Williams; he's freed him. In the right system, the QB has been given the chance to display his rare talent. Since Week 9, the Bears sit at fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a hot streak – it's sustained performance. With Johnson, Williams has become increasingly decisive, far less reckless, and has eagerly submitted to the system instead of freelancing. It is an offense constructed solely in Johnson's vision: a physical ground attack, a heavy dose of play-action passes and a innovative aerial game that frees wide receiver targets consistently. Williams has thrived. And when easy reads haven't been available, he's been capable to create big plays from nothing.

The coach arrived to the Bears with a specific offensive philosophy. Virtually each bet – rebuilding the offensive line, featuring the tight ends, transforming Williams into a rhythm passer – has worked. That's rare for a rookie head coach. And it's even more uncommon still for a leader who entered the building with the level of hype Johnson did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the most sought-after name on the head coaching market. However when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are no guarantees. Somehow, Johnson has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a offensive wizard but the type of leader that can inject new life into an franchise.

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

The area where his candidacy runs slightly unstuck is on defense. The Bears presently rank in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are living on takeaways, and takeaways are famously unreliable. Defensive minds can focus on ball disruption, but nobody can ensure it. He is on the ballot because the offensive production is legitimate. He's not higher because luck is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. If not for a couple breaks of the ball, the Bears would be several wins worse off. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the core is in place for sustained winning. But he comes up short here.

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

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar situation to Johnson. He's a fellow first-time head coach who has orchestrated a rapid resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best all-around football of his professional life. And he's also overseen the transformation of a defensive unit that now ranks number five in the NFL in EPA per play.

Even more impressively, Coen has nailed the off-field stuff, which was not a certainty after his early public introduction and some of his offseason moves.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an uncommonly inexperienced coaching staff. Unlike Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the perfect staff cocktail of youth and veteran savvy, Coen hired first-timers. Starting with the head coach himself to coordinators to position coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with first-timers. That type of approach is intriguing on paper, but frequently fails in reality – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everybody is figuring out a new job on the fly. But he has pulled everyone and everything together.

Following an initial hot start, there was a risk that the campaign would veer off the rails. A midseason setback caused the Jags wobbling again. That's typically when leaders panic and change too much. He didn't. Rather, he simplified things. Jacksonville stopped chasing explosive plays and started hunting reliable ones. Coen refocused the attack 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 consecutively and will be the AFC's No 3 playoff seed. He gets the tiniest deduction in the rankings because he inherited a skilled roster, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that roster.

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

Every Coach of the Year argument has a pivotal moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback move.

Moving on from a veteran, bringing in a different signal-caller and partnering him with an new offensive coordinator might have ended the campaign in the early weeks. Instead, it made it. Through the mid point of the year, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player front-runner. He has fallen away since that time, slipping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the second half of the schedule, putting him only one spot ahead of peers.

Still