The Way The Strange Season Redefined the Traditional NFL Coach of the Year Mould.

Usually, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year honor adheres to a simple script. It often acts as a type of apology. Sorry we underestimated your team in our preseason forecasts.

On paper, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the coach who engineered the most dramatic improvement wins the award. In reality, it sparks an yearly discussion about expectations and whether we're truly rewarding excellent leadership or just the greatest shock.

Yet this year's competition is profoundly unique. The group of nominees is remarkably strong. It has been the season of resurgences. The league has been chaotic, with reigning division winners falling away and recent also-rans improving in unison. Under an typical year, Sean Payton guiding the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the overwhelming front-runner. Yet in this chaotic and fun year, he's competing with multiple other exceptional candidates.

This is how the hypothetical ballot could look.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, His Team, Their Record

Coach of the Year selectors are fascinated by QBs. They always have. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. When you fix a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson not only corrected Caleb Williams; he's unleashed him. In the right ecosystem, Williams has been given the opportunity to showcase his otherworldly talent. Since midseason onward, the Chicago offense rank number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a lucky run – it's consistent excellence. With Johnson, Williams has become more confident, less careless, and has eagerly surrendered to the gameplan rather than going rogue. It is an offense constructed solely in Johnson's vision: a bully-ball ground attack, a steady helping of play-action passes and a creative passing attack that creates wide-open receivers all over the field. Williams has capitalized. And when clear throws weren't there, he's been capable to spin magic from broken plays.

Johnson came to the Bears with a clear offensive vision. Almost every gamble – rebuilding the trenches, utilizing the tight ends, transforming the QB into a timing-based thrower – has paid off. This is uncommon for a rookie skipper. And it's even more uncommon yet for a leader who entered the organization with the kind of expectations he did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the hottest name on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are zero sure things. Remarkably, he has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not just to be a scheme genius but the type of leader that can inject new life into an organization.

During a normal season, Johnson would be the overwhelming favorite. Yet this isn't a normal campaign!

Where Johnson's candidacy comes a bit unstuck is on defense. The Bears presently sit 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on takeaways, and turnovers are famously fickle. Defensive minds can focus on ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee it. He is on the ballot because the offensive production is real. He's not higher because variance is doing an outsized share of the defensive work. If not for a couple breaks of the ball, the Bears would be several victories worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the foundation is in place for sustained winning. But Johnson falls just short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4

Coen is in a similar situation to Johnson. He's a fellow first-time leader who has engineered a dramatic turnaround. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best overall football of his career. And he's also overseen the transformation of a defense that now ranks number five in the NFL in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more impressively, he has excelled at the off-field aspects, which wasn't a given following his early press conference appearances and some of his offseason decisions.

Coen walked into Jacksonville with an uncommonly inexperienced coaching staff. Unlike other coaches, who packed themselves with the ideal staff cocktail of new ideas and veteran savvy, he trusted newbies. From the leader on down to assistants to position coaches, the Jags are stocked with rookies. That kind of setup is exciting in theory, but frequently collapses in reality – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everybody is figuring out a their job in real-time. But he has pulled everyone and everything together.

Following an early hot beginning, there was a possibility that the season would veer off the track. A mid-year setback caused the team wobbling once more. That's typically when coaches overcorrect. Coen did not. Instead, he simplified things. Jacksonville stopped pursuing home-run plays and started seeking consistent ones. Coen refocused the attack around his playmakers and the running game, and asked 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 seed. Coen receives the slightest deduction in the standings because he inherited a talented team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that talent.

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

Each Strong of the Year case has a defining decision. For the Seahawks coach, it was his quarterback decision.

Parting ways from a veteran, signing a different quarterback and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator might have ended the season in the early weeks. Rather, it defined it. By the middle point of the year, the acquisition was an MVP contender. He has cooled off after that hot streak, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the second half of the season, placing him just a single place ahead of peers.

Still