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Usually, the NFL's Coach of the Year award follows a straightforward script. It often serves as a type of mea culpa. Our apologies we underestimated your team in our pre-campaign forecasts.

Theoretically, it's a clear-cut line: the skipper who orchestrated the most dramatic turnaround wins the prize. However, it creates an yearly argument about expectations and whether we're truly honoring excellent leadership or merely the biggest upset.

Yet the current competition is fundamentally different. The group of candidates is unusually talented. It has been the season of resurgences. The NFL has been messy, with reigning division winners fading and recent also-rans improving collectively. In an ordinary year, Sean Payton guiding the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the stone-cold front-runner. But in such a wild and entertaining season, he's up against several other outstanding coaches.

Here is how the hypothetical ballot should be structured.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, Their Record

Voters for Coach of the Year voters adore quarterbacks. They always have. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. If you transform a franchise QB, you're well on your way home.

The Bears' head coach not only fixed his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. Given a proper ecosystem, Williams has been afforded the chance to display his rare ability. From midseason onward, the Chicago offense sit at number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a lucky run – it's sustained dominance. With Johnson, the quarterback has become more confident, far less careless, and has eagerly submitted to the system instead of going rogue. It is an attack built solely in the coach's image: a bully-ball ground attack, a heavy helping of play-action and a imaginative aerial game that springs wide-open targets all over the field. Williams has capitalized. And when clear throws haven't been there, he's been capable to conjure magic from broken plays.

The coach arrived to the Bears with a specific offensive philosophy. Virtually each gamble – rebuilding the trenches, featuring the tight ends, transforming Williams into a rhythm passer – has paid off. This is uncommon for a first-year head coach. And it's rarer still for a coach who entered the organization with the level of expectations he did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the most sought-after candidate on the head coaching market. However when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are no sure things. Remarkably, he has lived up to expectations – and even exceeded them. He's demonstrated not just to be a scheme genius but the kind of culture builder that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.

In a normal year, he would be the runaway favorite. But the current is not a normal campaign!

Where Johnson's case runs slightly unstuck is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense currently rank in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on turnovers, and takeaways are famously unreliable. Coaches can emphasise creating turnovers, but nobody can guarantee it. He is on the ballot because the offense is legitimate. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defense's heavy lifting. If not for a few breaks of the ball, the team would be several victories worse off. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the foundation is in place for long-term success. However Johnson comes up just short in this ranking.

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

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable situation to Johnson. He's a fellow first-time head coach who has engineered a rapid turnaround. Over the crucial final weeks of the season, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest overall ball of his career. And he's also spearheaded the transformation of a defensive unit that now sits at fifth in the NFL in EPA per play.

Even more impressively, Coen has mastered the off-field aspects, which wasn't a given following his early press conference appearances and some of his offseason decisions.

The coach took over Jacksonville with an uncommonly raw staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded their staff with the perfect coaching mix of youth and veteran savvy, Coen hired newbies. Starting with the head coach on down to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jags are filled with first-timers. That type of approach is intriguing on paper, but frequently collapses in practice – with other teams are a warning – because everyone is learning a new job in real-time. But Coen has managed to bring the entire group and all elements together.

After an early hot beginning, there was a risk that the season would go off the rails. A mid-year setback had the team stumbling again. That's usually when coaches panic and change too much. Coen did not. Instead, he streamlined things. Jacksonville stopped chasing home-run plays and started seeking consistent ones. The coach recentered the offense around his playmakers and the ground attack, and asked his QB to use his legs more.

The outcomes are obvious. The Jaguars have won seven games in a row and will be the conference's No 3 playoff seed. Coen receives the tiniest deduction in the rankings because he took over a skilled roster, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that roster.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, Their Record

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

Moving on from a incumbent, signing a different quarterback and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator could have derailed the season in October. Rather, it made it. By the middle point of the season, the acquisition was an MVP front-runner. He has cooled off since that hot streak, slipping to a lower rank in efficiency per pass attempt over the latter part of the season, putting him just one spot ahead of other QBs.

Still