How This Strange Campaign Redefined the Traditional Coach of the Year Blueprint.
Usually, the National Football League's Coach of the Year award adheres to a simple script. It frequently functions as a type of mea culpa. We regret we misjudged your squad in our preseason projections.
Theoretically, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the coach who engineered the biggest resurgence is handed the award. In practice, it creates an yearly argument about expectations and whether we're genuinely rewarding superior coaching or simply the biggest upset.
However the latest field is fundamentally unique. The pool of candidates is exceptionally strong. It has been the season of turnarounds. The NFL has been messy, with recent division champions falling away and recent strugglers ascending in unison. In an normal year, Sean Payton guiding the his team to the top of the AFC would make him the stone-cold front-runner. Yet in such a wild and entertaining season, he's facing five other outstanding coaches.
Below is how the projected vote could look.
5) The Chicago Bears Coach, His Team, 11-5
Coach of the Year voters love QBs. They always have. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. If you solve a franchise QB, you're well on your way to winning the award.
Ben Johnson didn't merely corrected his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. Within an ideal environment, the QB has been afforded the opportunity to display his otherworldly talent. Since midseason onward, the Bears sit at number four in offensive EPA per play. That's not a lucky run – it's consistent excellence. With Johnson, the quarterback has become more confident, far less reckless, and has willingly surrendered to the gameplan instead of going rogue. It is an attack constructed entirely in the coach's image: a bully-ball ground attack, a heavy dose of play-action passes and a innovative passing attack that springs wide-open receivers all over the field. The QB has capitalized. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been able to spin magic out of nothing.
Johnson came to Chicago with a specific offensive vision. Almost every gamble – overhauling the offensive line, highlighting the pass-catchers, turning Williams into a rhythm passer – has worked. This is rare for a rookie skipper. And it's rarer yet for a coach who entered the building with the immense hype Johnson did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the top candidate on the head coaching market. But when it comes to hiring a leader, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has met expectations – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not only to be a offensive genius but the kind of culture builder that can inject fresh energy into an organization.
During a typical year, he would be the clear-cut favorite. But this isn't a typical year!
Where Johnson's candidacy comes a bit into trouble is on the defensive side. The Bears currently rank 25th in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on takeaways, and takeaways are notoriously inconsistent. Defensive minds can emphasise ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee 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 bounces of the ball, the team would be several wins worse off. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is in place for sustained success. However Johnson falls just short in this ranking.
4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4
Coen is in a comparable position to Johnson. He's another rookie head coach who has engineered a dramatic resurgence. Over the stretch run of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest overall ball of his professional life. And he's also overseen the remaking of a defense that now ranks fifth in the NFL in EPA per play.
Even more impressively, Coen has mastered the off-field aspects, which wasn't a given after his initial press conference introduction and some of his offseason decisions.
The coach took over the Jaguars with an exceptionally raw staff. Unlike other coaches, who packed themselves with the ideal coaching blend of new ideas and experience, he hired newbies. Starting with the head coach himself to assistants to position coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That type of approach is intriguing on paper, but often collapses in reality – with other teams are a warning – because everyone is figuring out a their job on the fly. But Coen has managed to bring everyone and everything into sync.
Following an initial hot beginning, there was a possibility that the season would veer off the track. A mid-year collapse had the team wobbling once more. That's typically when coaches panic and change too much. Coen didn't. Rather, he streamlined things. The offense stopped pursuing explosive plays and started hunting reliable ones. Coen recentered the attack around key players and the running game, and asked Lawrence to use his mobility more often.
The results are evident. The Jaguars have won multiple games consecutively and will be the AFC's number three playoff seed. He gets the slightest knock in the rankings because he inherited a talented roster, but he has proven he can maximize that roster.
3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, 13-3
Every Coach of the Year narrative has a defining decision. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB move.
Parting ways from a incumbent, signing a different quarterback and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator might have ended the campaign in the early weeks. Instead, it defined it. By the mid point of the season, the new QB was an MVP contender. He has cooled off since that hot streak, dropping to 23rd in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the season, putting him just one spot ahead of other QBs.
Still
