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Usually, the NFL's Coach of the Year honor follows a straightforward formula. It often acts as a kind of mea culpa. Our apologies we underestimated your franchise in our preseason projections.

On paper, it's a direct path: the coach who engineered the biggest improvement wins the prize. In practice, it sparks an yearly debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly rewarding superior leadership or merely the most shocking surprise.

But the latest competition is fundamentally different. The group of contenders is remarkably deep. It has been the campaign of comebacks. The NFL has been chaotic, with recent conference winners falling away and recent also-rans ascending in unison. In an typical season, a coach leading the Denver Broncos to the summit of the AFC would make him the clear favorite. But in this turbulent and fun season, he's up against several other outstanding candidates.

Here is how the projected ballot should shake out.

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

Coach of the Year voters adore quarterbacks. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. If you transform a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson not only fixed Caleb Williams; he's unlocked him. In the right environment, Williams has been given the opportunity to display his special ability. Since midseason onward, the Bears rank fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a hot streak – it's sustained dominance. With his guidance, the quarterback has become increasingly confident, far less reckless, and has eagerly surrendered to the system rather than improvising. It is an offense constructed solely in Johnson's vision: a bully-ball run game, a steady dose of play-action passes and a imaginative passing attack that frees wide-open targets everywhere. Williams has capitalized. And when openings haven't been there, he's been capable to spin big plays from broken plays.

Johnson arrived to the Bears with a defined offensive vision. Virtually every gamble – overhauling the trenches, highlighting the tight ends, turning the QB into a rhythm thrower – has succeeded. That's uncommon for a rookie skipper. And it's even more uncommon still for a leader who walked into the building with the kind of expectations he did. For two straight cycles, he was the top name on the head coaching carousel. But when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are zero sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not just to be a offensive dork but the type of culture builder that can inject new life into an organization.

During a ordinary season, Johnson would be the runaway favorite. But the current isn't a typical campaign!

The area where his case comes slightly into trouble is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense currently rank in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on turnovers, and turnovers are famously inconsistent. Coaches can focus on creating turnovers, but no one can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is legitimate. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defense's heavy lifting. If not for a couple bounces of the ball, the team would be two victories worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is established for long-term winning. But Johnson comes up just short in this ranking.

4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar spot to his counterpart. He's another first-time head coach who has engineered a swift turnaround. Over the stretch run of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best overall ball of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the remaking of a defense that now ranks fifth in the league in EPA per play.

What's more notably, he has mastered the off-field stuff, which wasn't a certainty following his early press conference appearances and some of his offseason decisions.

Coen took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally raw staff. In contrast to Johnson, who surrounded themselves with the perfect coaching blend of youth and experience, Coen bet on newbies. Starting with the head coach on down to assistants to position coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with rookies. That kind of approach is intriguing on paper, but often fails in practice – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everybody is learning a their job on the fly. Yet he has pulled the entire group and everything together.

After an initial strong start, there was a risk that the season would veer off the track. A midseason collapse had the Jags stumbling once more. That's usually when leaders panic and change too much. He did not. Instead, he simplified things. The offense stopped pursuing home-run answers and started hunting sustainable ones. Coen refocused the offense around key players and the running game, and asked his QB to use his mobility more often.

The results are clear. The Jaguars have won seven games consecutively and will be the conference's number three seed. Coen gets the tiniest knock in the standings because he inherited a talented roster, but he has proven he can maximize that roster.

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

Every Coach of the Year narrative has a defining moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB move.

Parting ways from a incumbent, signing a different quarterback and pairing him with an innovative play-caller might have ended the campaign in the early weeks. Rather, it defined it. By the middle point of the season, the new QB was an MVP contender. He has cooled off after that hot streak, slipping to a lower rank in efficiency per pass attempt over the latter part of the season, placing him just a single spot ahead of other QBs.

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