How This Bizarre Season Broke the Typical NFL Coach of the Year Mould.
Ordinarily, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor follows a straightforward script. It frequently serves as a type of apology. Sorry we got wrong your franchise in our preseason predictions.
Theoretically, it's a direct line: the skipper who orchestrated the biggest turnaround wins the award. In practice, it fuels an yearly argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly honoring superior leadership or simply the greatest surprise.
But the current race is distinctly unique. The group of candidates is exceptionally strong. It has been the season of comebacks. The league has been unpredictable, with recent conference champions declining and longtime strugglers improving together. In an typical season, Sean Payton guiding the Denver Broncos to the summit of the AFC would make him the overwhelming front-runner. But in such a turbulent and entertaining year, he's facing multiple other elite candidates.
Below is how the hypothetical vote should look.
5) The Chicago Bears Coach, Chicago Bears, Their Record
Coach of the Year selectors adore quarterbacks. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. If you solve a quarterback, you're halfway home.
The Bears' head coach hasn't just fixed his young quarterback; he's freed him. Within an ideal system, Williams has been given the opportunity to demonstrate his otherworldly talent. From Week 9, the Chicago offense sit at fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a hot streak – it's prolonged excellence. Under Johnson, the quarterback has become more confident, less careless, and has eagerly submitted to the scheme instead of improvising. It is an offense constructed entirely in the coach's image: a bully-ball ground attack, a heavy dose of play-action and a creative passing attack that frees wide receiver targets consistently. Williams has taken advantage. And when clear throws weren't available, he's been capable to spin magic from broken plays.
The coach arrived to Chicago with a defined offensive vision. Almost every decision – rebuilding the trenches, highlighting the pass-catchers, turning Williams into a rhythm passer – has worked. That's uncommon for a rookie skipper. And it's rarer still for a leader who walked into the organization with the level of hype he did. For two straight offseasons, he was the top candidate on the head coaching carousel. But when it comes to hiring a leader, there are no guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not only to be a scheme wizard but the type of culture builder that can inject fresh energy into an organization.
During a normal season, Johnson would be the clear-cut choice. Yet the current isn't a typical campaign!
The area where Johnson's candidacy runs slightly into trouble is on defense. The Bears presently rank 25th in defensive success rate. They are relying on takeaways, and takeaways are famously unreliable. Defensive minds can focus on ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee it. He is on the list because the offense is sustainable. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defensive work. With a few breaks of the ball, the team would be two wins behind. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the core is in place for sustained winning. However he comes up short here.
4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, His Team, Their Record
Coen is in a comparable situation to Johnson. He's another first-time head coach who has orchestrated a swift resurgence. During the crucial final weeks of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the most complete overall football of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the transformation of a defense that now ranks fifth in the league in Expected Points Added per play.
What's more impressively, he has excelled at the leadership aspects, which was not a given following his early press conference appearances and some of his preseason decisions.
The coach walked into Jacksonville with an exceptionally raw coaching staff. Unlike Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the ideal staff cocktail of new ideas and veteran savvy, Coen hired newbies. Starting with the leader on down to coordinators to position coaches, the Jags are stocked with rookies. That type of approach is exciting on paper, but frequently collapses in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everybody is learning a their job on the fly. Yet Coen has pulled the entire group and all elements together.
Following an initial strong beginning, there was a chance that the campaign would go off the track. A mid-year setback had the Jags stumbling once more. That's usually when leaders panic and change too much. He 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 ground attack, and encouraged Lawrence to use his mobility more.
The outcomes are evident. The Jaguars have won seven games consecutively and will be the AFC's number three playoff seed. Coen gets the slightest deduction in the standings because he inherited a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that roster.
3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, His Team, 13-3
Every Coach of the Year argument has a hinge moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB decision.
Moving on from a incumbent, bringing in a different quarterback and pairing him with an innovative play-caller could have derailed the campaign in the early weeks. Rather, it made it. By the middle point of the year, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has regressed since that hot streak, dropping to a lower rank in EPA per pass attempt over the latter part of the schedule, putting him only a single place ahead of other QBs.
Still
