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Typically, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year award adheres to a simple pattern. It often acts as a type of mea culpa. Our apologies we misjudged your team in our preseason predictions.

On paper, it's a clear-cut path: the skipper who engineered the largest improvement is handed the award. In practice, it creates an annual argument about expectations and whether we're truly honoring excellent leadership or merely the most shocking surprise.

However the latest race is distinctly unique. The list of candidates is unusually strong. It has been the campaign of resurgences. The NFL has been chaotic, with recent conference champions falling away and longtime also-rans rising together. Under an normal season, Sean Payton leading the his team to the top of the conference would make him the clear favorite. Yet in this turbulent and thrilling season, he's competing with several other outstanding candidates.

This is how the hypothetical ballot could look.

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

Coach of the Year selectors adore QBs. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. When you solve a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach not only fixed his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. Given a proper system, the QB has been given the opportunity to demonstrate his special talent. Since Week 9, the Bears sit at fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a lucky run – it's consistent excellence. With Johnson, the quarterback has become more decisive, less reckless, and has willingly submitted to the gameplan rather than freelancing. It is an offense built entirely in Johnson's image: a bully-ball run game, a consistent helping of play-action passes and a imaginative passing attack that creates wide-open targets everywhere. The QB has thrived. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been capable to spin big plays from nothing.

The coach arrived to the Bears with a specific offensive vision. Virtually every bet – rebuilding the trenches, utilizing the pass-catchers, turning Williams into a rhythm passer – has paid off. That's uncommon for a first-year skipper. And it's rarer still for a coach who walked into the organization with the immense hype he did. For two straight cycles, he was the hottest name on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has lived up to expectations – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not only to be a scheme genius but the kind of leader that can breathe fresh energy into an franchise.

During a normal year, Johnson would be the overwhelming choice. But the current is not a typical year!

Where his case comes slightly unstuck is on defense. The Chicago defense currently rank 25th in defensive success rate. They are surviving on turnovers, and takeaways are famously fickle. Coaches can emphasise creating turnovers, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offensive production is sustainable. He's ranked lower because variance is doing too much of the defense's heavy lifting. With a few bounces of the ball, the Bears would be several victories worse off. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the foundation is established for long-term success. But Johnson falls just short in this ranking.

4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4

Coen is in a comparable situation to Johnson. He's a fellow first-time head coach who has engineered a swift turnaround. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest all-around football of his professional life. And he's also overseen the transformation of a defense that now sits at number five in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

Even more impressively, he has mastered the off-field aspects, which wasn't a certainty after his early press conference introduction and some of his preseason decisions.

Coen took over the Jaguars with an exceptionally inexperienced coaching staff. Unlike Johnson, who packed themselves with the perfect coaching cocktail of youth and experience, he bet on first-timers. Starting with the leader himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That kind of setup is intriguing in theory, but frequently fails in practice – as past failures are a warning – because everyone is figuring out a their job on the fly. Yet Coen has pulled everyone and everything into sync.

After an initial strong start, there was a chance that the season would go off the track. A mid-year setback had the Jags stumbling again. That's typically when leaders panic and change too much. Coen didn't. Rather, he streamlined things. Jacksonville stopped pursuing home-run plays and started seeking reliable ones. The coach refocused the attack around key players and the running game, and encouraged Lawrence to use his legs more.

The outcomes are obvious. The Jaguars have won seven games in a row and will be the AFC's No 3 playoff seed. He receives the tiniest knock in the standings because he inherited a talented roster, but he has proven he can get the most out of that roster.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record

Every Coach of the Year argument has a pivotal moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB decision.

Moving on from a incumbent, bringing in a new quarterback and partnering him with an innovative offensive coordinator might have ended the campaign in October. Instead, it shaped it. By the middle point of the year, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player candidate. He has cooled off after that hot streak, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the season, placing him only a single place ahead of other QBs.

Still