How This Strange Season Shattered the Conventional Coach of the Year Formula.
Usually, the NFL's Coach of the Year honor follows a simple formula. It often functions as a kind of mea culpa. Our apologies we underestimated your squad in our preseason projections.
On paper, it's a direct path: the coach who orchestrated the largest improvement wins the prize. However, it creates an yearly debate about expectations and whether we're genuinely rewarding superior coaching or merely the biggest surprise.
Yet this year's competition is distinctly different. The pool of nominees is unusually deep. It has been the season of resurgences. The league has been messy, with recent division winners fading and recent underperformers improving collectively. During an ordinary year, a coach leading the Denver Broncos to the top of the conference would make him the clear front-runner. But in such a turbulent and thrilling season, he's facing several other outstanding candidates.
This is how the ideal vote could look.
5) Ben Johnson, His Team, 11-5
Voters for Coach of the Year voters love quarterbacks. They always have. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. When you fix a quarterback, you're well on your way home.
Ben Johnson hasn't just fixed his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. Within an ideal system, Williams has been given the chance to showcase his otherworldly talent. From midseason onward, the Bears rank number four in offensive Expected Points Added 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 surrendered to the gameplan instead of improvising. It is an attack built solely in Johnson's vision: a physical run game, a heavy dose of play-action passes and a innovative aerial game that frees wide-open targets everywhere. Williams has capitalized. And when openings haven't been there, he's been able to conjure magic out of nothing.
Johnson came to Chicago with a clear offensive philosophy. Virtually each bet – overhauling the offensive line, highlighting the tight ends, turning Williams into a rhythm passer – has paid off. This is rare for a first-year skipper. And it's even more uncommon still for a leader who entered the building with the kind of expectations he did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the hottest candidate on the coaching carousel. But when it comes to hiring a leader, there are no guarantees. Remarkably, he has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's proven not only to be a scheme genius but the type of leader that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.
During a typical season, he would be the overwhelming favorite. But this is not a typical campaign!
Where Johnson's case runs slightly into trouble is on the defensive side. The Bears presently sit 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on turnovers, and turnovers are famously inconsistent. Defensive minds can focus on ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. He is on the list because the offense is sustainable. He's not higher because luck is doing an outsized share of the defensive heavy lifting. 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 core is in place for sustained success. However Johnson comes up just short here.
4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4
Coen is in a similar situation to Johnson. He's another rookie head coach who has masterminded a dramatic resurgence. During the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the most complete all-around football of his professional life. And he's also overseen the overhaul of a defense that now sits at number five in the NFL in EPA per play.
Even more notably, Coen has nailed the leadership stuff, which wasn't a given after his initial press conference introduction and some of his preseason moves.
The coach walked into the Jaguars with an exceptionally raw staff. Unlike Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the ideal coaching mix of youth and veteran savvy, Coen hired newbies. From the leader himself to coordinators to position coaches, the Jags are filled with rookies. That kind of approach is intriguing in theory, but often fails in reality – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everybody is figuring out a their job on the fly. Yet Coen has pulled the entire group and everything into sync.
Following an early strong start, there was a chance that the season would go off the track. A midseason setback caused the team wobbling again. That's typically when leaders overcorrect. Coen didn't. Rather, he streamlined things. The offense stopped pursuing home-run answers and started seeking reliable ones. The coach refocused the offense around his playmakers and the running game, and asked Lawrence to use his mobility more.
The outcomes are evident. The Jags have won multiple games in a row and will be the conference's number three seed. He receives the slightest deduction in the rankings because he took over a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that talent.
3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3
Every Coach of the Year narrative has a hinge moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB move.
Parting ways from a veteran, bringing in a new signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative play-caller could have derailed the season in October. Rather, it made it. By the mid point of the year, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player candidate. He has regressed after that hot streak, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the season, putting him just a single spot ahead of other QBs.
Still
