How The Bizarre Season Shattered the Typical Coach of the Year Blueprint.
Usually, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year trophy follows a simple pattern. It often functions as a kind of mea culpa. Sorry we underestimated your team in our preseason predictions.
On paper, it's a direct line: the skipper who orchestrated the most dramatic resurgence is handed the award. In practice, it fuels an annual debate about expectations and whether we're genuinely rewarding excellent leadership or simply the biggest shock.
Yet the latest field is profoundly different. The group of contenders is exceptionally strong. It has been the season of comebacks. The league has been messy, with reigning division winners declining and longtime strugglers improving together. Under an normal year, Sean Payton leading the his team to the top of the AFC would make him the stone-cold favorite. But in such a turbulent and entertaining season, he's competing with multiple other elite candidates.
Below is how the hypothetical vote should shake out.
5) The Chicago Bears Coach, His Team, 11-5
Voters for Coach of the Year voters are fascinated by quarterbacks. They always have. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. Should you solve a franchise QB, you're halfway home.
The Bears' head coach hasn't just corrected his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. In the right ecosystem, the QB has been given the opportunity to showcase his rare talent. Since midseason onward, the Bears rank fourth in offensive EPA per play. That's not a lucky run – it's consistent excellence. Under Johnson, the quarterback has become more decisive, far less reckless, and has eagerly submitted to the scheme rather than going rogue. It is an attack designed entirely in Johnson's image: a physical run game, a steady helping of play-action passes and a innovative passing attack that frees wide-open receivers everywhere. The QB has capitalized. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been able to create big plays from broken plays.
The coach arrived to the Bears with a defined offensive vision. Almost every gamble – rebuilding the trenches, utilizing the pass-catchers, transforming Williams into a rhythm thrower – has succeeded. That's rare for a rookie skipper. And it's rarer still for a coach who walked into the building with the level of expectations he did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the hottest name on the head coaching carousel. But when it comes to selecting a head coach, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has lived up to expectations – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a offensive genius but the kind of culture builder that can inject new life into an franchise.
During a typical season, Johnson would be the runaway favorite. Yet the current is not a normal year!
Where his case runs a bit unstuck is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense presently sit 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on turnovers, and turnovers are famously unreliable. Coaches can focus on creating turnovers, but no one can ensure it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is sustainable. He's ranked lower because variance is doing too much of the defense's work. If not for a few bounces of the ball, the team would be several wins worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is established for sustained success. But he comes up just short here.
4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4
The Jaguars' coach is in a similar position to Johnson. He's a fellow first-time head coach who has masterminded a dramatic turnaround. During the crucial final weeks of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest all-around football of his career. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defensive unit that now ranks fifth in the NFL in EPA per play.
What's more notably, Coen has nailed the intangibles stuff, which wasn't a certainty following his early public appearances and some of his preseason moves.
Coen took over the Jaguars with an exceptionally inexperienced staff. Unlike Johnson, who surrounded themselves with the perfect coaching mix of youth and veteran savvy, Coen bet on newbies. From the head coach himself to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are filled with rookies. That kind of approach is exciting on paper, but frequently collapses in practice – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everyone is learning a new job on the fly. But he has managed to bring the entire group and everything together.
After an early hot beginning, there was a possibility that the campaign would veer off the track. A midseason collapse caused the team wobbling once more. That's usually when leaders panic and change too much. He didn't. Instead, he simplified things. Jacksonville stopped pursuing explosive answers and started hunting sustainable ones. The coach refocused the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and encouraged Lawrence to use his mobility more.
The outcomes are obvious. The Jaguars have won seven games in a row and will be the conference's number three seed. He receives the tiniest knock in the rankings because he took over a talented team, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that talent.
3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record
Every Coach of the Year case has a pivotal moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback move.
Parting ways from a veteran, bringing in a different quarterback and partnering him with an innovative offensive coordinator could have derailed the season in October. Rather, it shaped it. Through the middle point of the year, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has cooled off since that hot streak, slipping to a lower rank in efficiency per pass attempt over the second half of the schedule, placing him just one spot ahead of other QBs.
Still
