How This Bizarre Campaign Redefined the Traditional Coach of the Year Formula.
Usually, the National Football League's Coach of the Year award follows a simple script. It often serves as a type of apology. We regret we underestimated your franchise in our pre-campaign predictions.
On paper, it's a clear-cut line: the coach who oversaw the biggest turnaround wins the prize. In practice, it fuels an annual discussion about expectations and whether we're genuinely honoring superior leadership or merely the greatest upset.
But the current competition is distinctly different. The pool of nominees is unusually talented. It has been the year of turnarounds. The league has been messy, with reigning conference winners declining and longtime strugglers improving together. During an normal season, a coach guiding the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the stone-cold front-runner. Yet in this wild and fun season, he's competing with five other elite coaches.
Below is how the ideal ballot should shake out.
5) Ben Johnson, His Team, 11-5
Voters for Coach of the Year selectors adore quarterbacks. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. Should you fix a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.
Ben Johnson not only fixed Caleb Williams; he's freed him. In the right ecosystem, Williams has been given the chance to demonstrate his rare ability. Since midseason onward, the Bears rank fourth in offensive EPA per play. This isn't a hot streak – it's prolonged performance. With Johnson, the quarterback has become increasingly confident, less reckless, and has willingly surrendered to the gameplan instead of going rogue. It is an offense constructed solely in Johnson's vision: a bully-ball ground attack, a consistent helping of play-action passes and a imaginative aerial game that springs wide-open targets consistently. The QB has thrived. And when easy reads weren't available, he's been capable to spin magic out of broken plays.
Johnson came to the Bears with a defined offensive philosophy. Virtually each bet – overhauling the trenches, utilizing the tight ends, turning Williams into a timing-based passer – has worked. That's uncommon for a rookie skipper. And it's even more uncommon yet for a leader who walked into the organization with the kind of hype Johnson did. For two straight offseasons, he was the top candidate on the head coaching market. However when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has lived up to expectations – and even exceeded them. He's proven not only to be a offensive genius but the type of culture builder that can breathe fresh energy into an organization.
In a ordinary year, he would be the clear-cut favorite. But this isn't a typical season!
The area where his candidacy runs slightly unstuck is on defense. The Chicago defense presently rank 25th in defensive success rate. They are relying on takeaways, and takeaways are famously inconsistent. Coaches can stress ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. He is on the list because the offensive production is real. He's not higher because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. With a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be two victories worse off. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is established for sustained winning. However he falls just short in this ranking.
4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4
Coen is in a similar situation to Johnson. He's another rookie head coach who has orchestrated a dramatic resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the most complete overall ball of his career. And he's also overseen the overhaul of a defense that now ranks fifth in the league in Expected Points Added per play.
Even more notably, he has mastered the off-field stuff, which was not a guarantee after his early press conference introduction and some of his offseason decisions.
The coach took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally raw staff. In contrast to Johnson, who packed themselves with the ideal staff cocktail of youth and veteran savvy, Coen trusted newbies. From the head coach on down to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jags are filled with rookies. That type of approach is exciting on paper, but often collapses in practice – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a new job in real-time. Yet Coen has managed to bring the entire group and everything together.
Following an early strong start, there was a possibility that the season would go off the rails. A midseason collapse caused the Jags stumbling again. That's typically when leaders panic and change too much. Coen didn't. Rather, he simplified things. Jacksonville stopped pursuing home-run plays and started seeking consistent ones. Coen recentered the attack around his playmakers and the running game, and encouraged his QB to use his mobility more often.
The outcomes are evident. The Jaguars have won seven games consecutively and will be the conference's No 3 playoff seed. He receives the slightest deduction in the standings because he took over a talented team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that roster.
3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3
Every Coach of the Year case has a pivotal moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB decision.
Parting ways from a veteran, signing a different signal-caller and partnering him with an innovative play-caller could have derailed the season in October. Rather, it shaped it. By the mid 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 pass attempt over the second half of the schedule, placing him only one place ahead of peers.
Still
