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Typically, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor adheres to a simple pattern. It commonly serves as a type of apology. We regret we underestimated your team in our preseason predictions.

Theoretically, it's a direct trajectory: the coach who engineered the biggest improvement is handed the award. In reality, it creates an yearly debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly honoring superior leadership or merely the biggest surprise.

Yet this year's competition is distinctly unique. The pool of nominees is remarkably deep. It has been the campaign of resurgences. The NFL has been chaotic, with recent division winners falling away and longtime strugglers ascending in unison. Under an typical year, Sean Payton leading the his team to the top of the conference would make him the stone-cold favorite. But in this wild and entertaining season, he's up against several other outstanding coaches.

This is how the projected ballot ought to shake out.

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

Coach of the Year selectors adore quarterbacks. History shows this. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. When you fix a quarterback, you're well on your way home.

The Bears' head coach hasn't just corrected his young quarterback; he's freed him. Within an ideal ecosystem, Williams has been given the chance to display his special talent. Since Week 9, the Bears sit at number four in offensive EPA per play. That's not a hot streak – it's consistent excellence. With Johnson, the quarterback has become increasingly decisive, less careless, and has eagerly surrendered to the system instead of improvising. It is an offense designed solely in the coach's image: a bully-ball run game, a heavy helping of play-action passes and a creative aerial game that creates wide-open targets all over the field. The QB has taken advantage. And when easy reads haven't been available, he's been capable to create magic out of nothing.

The coach came to Chicago with a defined offensive philosophy. Almost every bet – overhauling the offensive line, featuring the tight ends, turning the QB into a rhythm thrower – has worked. This is rare for a first-year skipper. And it's rarer still for a leader who walked into the building with the immense expectations he did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the hottest candidate on the head coaching market. However when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has lived up to expectations – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not just to be a offensive wizard but the type of leader that can breathe fresh energy into an organization.

In a normal year, he would be the overwhelming favorite. But this isn't a typical year!

The area where Johnson's candidacy runs a bit into trouble is on the defensive side. The Bears currently rank in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on takeaways, and turnovers are famously fickle. Defensive minds can emphasise creating turnovers, but nobody can ensure it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is real. He's ranked lower because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's heavy lifting. If not for a couple breaks of the ball, the Bears would be two wins worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is established for sustained winning. However Johnson falls just short here.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

Coen is in a comparable position to his counterpart. He's another first-time leader who has engineered a swift resurgence. Over the stretch run of the season, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest all-around football of his career. And he's also overseen the remaking of a defense that now ranks fifth in the NFL in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more impressively, he has nailed the leadership stuff, which was not a certainty after his early public introduction and some of his preseason decisions.

Coen walked into Jacksonville with an exceptionally raw coaching staff. Unlike Johnson, who surrounded themselves with the ideal coaching blend of new ideas and experience, he hired newbies. Starting with the head coach on down to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are filled with first-timers. That type of approach is exciting on paper, but frequently fails in reality – with other teams are a warning – because everyone is learning a their job on the fly. Yet he has pulled everyone and everything into sync.

After an early strong start, there was a possibility that the season would veer off the rails. A mid-year setback caused the Jags wobbling once more. That's typically when leaders overcorrect. He did not. Instead, he simplified the approach. Jacksonville stopped pursuing home-run answers and started hunting reliable ones. Coen recentered the attack around his playmakers and the running game, and asked his QB to use his legs more.

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

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, Their Record

Each Coach of the Year narrative has a hinge moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback decision.

Moving on from a veteran, bringing in a different quarterback and partnering him with an new offensive coordinator could have derailed the season in the early weeks. Rather, it made it. By the middle point of the year, the new QB was an MVP front-runner. He has cooled off since that time, slipping to 23rd in EPA per dropback over the latter part of the schedule, placing him only one place ahead of peers.

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