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Ordinarily, the NFL's Head Coach of the Year award adheres to a simple script. It often acts as a form of apology. Our apologies we got wrong your team in our pre-campaign predictions.

On paper, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the coach who engineered the biggest improvement wins the award. In practice, it fuels an annual discussion about expectations and whether we're truly rewarding excellent leadership or simply the biggest upset.

But the current field is distinctly unique. The pool of contenders is remarkably talented. It has been the year of comebacks. The league has been messy, with recent division winners fading and longtime strugglers improving in unison. In an normal year, a coach guiding the his team to the top of the AFC would make him the overwhelming front-runner. Yet in this wild and entertaining season, he's competing with several other exceptional coaches.

This is how the projected ballot could be structured.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, Their Record

Coach of the Year voters love QBs. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. Should you fix a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson not only corrected his young quarterback; he's unlocked him. In the right environment, Williams has been given the opportunity to display his otherworldly talent. Since Week 9, the Bears sit at fourth in offensive EPA per play. That's not a hot streak – it's prolonged excellence. With his guidance, the quarterback has become increasingly confident, far less careless, and has eagerly surrendered to the gameplan rather than improvising. It is an offense designed entirely in Johnson's image: a physical run game, a steady dose of play-action passes and a innovative passing attack that creates wide-open receivers everywhere. Williams has capitalized. And when easy reads weren't there, he's been capable to conjure big plays from nothing.

The coach came to Chicago with a defined offensive philosophy. Almost each bet – overhauling the trenches, featuring the tight ends, turning Williams into a rhythm passer – has paid off. That's uncommon for a rookie skipper. And it's rarer still for a coach who walked into the building with the level of hype Johnson did. For two straight offseasons, he was the top name on the 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 proven not only to be a scheme dork but the type of culture builder that can breathe fresh energy into an franchise.

In a typical season, Johnson would be the overwhelming choice. Yet this isn't a normal campaign!

Where Johnson's candidacy runs slightly into trouble is on defense. The Bears currently rank 25th in defensive efficiency. They are living on takeaways, and takeaways are famously inconsistent. Coaches can stress ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. He is on the ballot because the offense is real. He's ranked lower because variance is doing too much of the defensive heavy lifting. If not for a few breaks of the ball, the Bears would be several wins behind. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is in place for sustained success. However he comes up short here.

4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, His Team, Their Record

Coen is in a comparable position to his counterpart. He's a fellow first-time head coach who has orchestrated a dramatic resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest all-around football of his career. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defense that now ranks number five in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more impressively, Coen has nailed the intangibles stuff, which wasn't a guarantee following his early press conference appearances and some of his preseason decisions.

Coen walked into Jacksonville with an exceptionally inexperienced coaching staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the perfect coaching cocktail of youth and veteran savvy, he trusted first-timers. Starting with the head coach himself to coordinators to position coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That type of setup is intriguing in theory, but frequently collapses in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everybody is figuring out a their job on the fly. But Coen has pulled the entire group and all elements into sync.

After an initial hot beginning, there was a chance that the season would go off the rails. A midseason setback had the team stumbling once more. That's typically when leaders overcorrect. Coen did not. Instead, he streamlined the approach. The offense stopped pursuing home-run plays and started hunting consistent ones. Coen refocused the attack around his playmakers and the running game, and encouraged Lawrence to use his legs more.

The results are evident. The Jags have won seven games in a row and will be the AFC's number three playoff seed. He receives the slightest deduction in the standings because he inherited a skilled roster, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that talent.

3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, His Team, 13-3

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

Parting ways from a veteran, bringing in a new signal-caller and partnering him with an new offensive coordinator might have ended the campaign in October. Instead, it made it. By the mid point of the season, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player candidate. He has fallen away since that hot streak, slipping to 23rd in efficiency per dropback over the second half of the season, putting him only one spot ahead of other QBs.

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