How This Strange Season Broke the Typical Coach of the Year Blueprint.
Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year award follows a straightforward formula. It frequently functions as a kind of mea culpa. Our apologies we underestimated your squad in our preseason forecasts.
Theoretically, it's a clear-cut line: the skipper who oversaw the largest improvement receives the prize. In practice, it fuels an yearly argument about expectations and whether we're genuinely rewarding excellent leadership or merely the greatest shock.
But this year's competition is distinctly different. The list of contenders is unusually deep. It has been the season of resurgences. The league has been chaotic, with recent conference winners declining and longtime strugglers ascending collectively. During an normal season, a coach leading the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the overwhelming favorite. Yet in this chaotic and entertaining season, he's up against five other exceptional coaches.
Here is how the projected vote could be structured.
5) Ben Johnson, His Team, 11-5
Coach of the Year voters adore quarterbacks. They always have. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. When you fix a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.
Ben Johnson not only fixed Caleb Williams; he's unlocked him. In the right environment, the QB has been given the opportunity to showcase his special ability. From midseason onward, the Bears sit at number four in offensive EPA per play. That's not a brief surge – it's sustained dominance. With his guidance, Williams has become more confident, far less careless, and has willingly submitted to the system rather than freelancing. It is an attack constructed entirely in the coach's image: a bully-ball run game, a steady helping of play-action passes and a imaginative passing attack that frees wide-open receivers everywhere. Williams has thrived. And when easy reads haven't been available, he's been able to spin big plays out of nothing.
Johnson arrived to Chicago with a clear offensive blueprint. Virtually every gamble – overhauling the trenches, utilizing the tight ends, turning Williams into a timing-based passer – has worked. This is uncommon for a first-year skipper. And it's rarer yet for a leader who walked into the building with the immense expectations he did. For two straight cycles, he was the hottest candidate on the head coaching market. But when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are zero guarantees. Somehow, he has met expectations – and even exceeded them. He's proven not only to be a scheme wizard but the type of leader that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.
In a normal season, Johnson would be the clear-cut favorite. Yet this isn't a normal year!
The area where his case comes a bit into trouble is on the defensive side. The Bears presently rank 25th in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on takeaways, and takeaways are famously unreliable. Coaches can stress creating turnovers, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is sustainable. He's ranked lower because variance is doing too much of the defensive work. With a couple breaks of the ball, the Bears would be two victories worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the foundation is in place for long-term success. But he comes up short in this ranking.
4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record
The Jaguars' coach is in a similar position to his counterpart. He's another rookie head coach who has orchestrated a rapid resurgence. During the crucial final weeks of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best overall ball of his professional life. And he's also overseen the transformation of a defensive unit that now ranks fifth in the league in EPA per play.
What's more notably, Coen has mastered the leadership aspects, which wasn't a given after his initial public introduction and some of his offseason moves.
Coen took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally inexperienced staff. Unlike Johnson, who surrounded themselves with the perfect staff mix of youth and veteran savvy, Coen bet on newbies. Starting with the leader on down to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with rookies. That type of approach is intriguing in theory, but often collapses in reality – as past failures are a warning – because everyone is figuring out a their job on the fly. Yet Coen has pulled the entire group and all elements into sync.
After an early strong start, there was a chance that the campaign would veer off the rails. A mid-year setback caused the team wobbling once more. That's usually when coaches overcorrect. Coen did not. Rather, he simplified things. Jacksonville stopped chasing home-run answers and started hunting sustainable ones. The coach refocused the attack around key players and the ground attack, and encouraged his QB 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 seed. He gets the slightest knock in the rankings because he inherited a talented team, but he has proven he can get the most out of that talent.
3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3
Each Strong of the Year case has a pivotal decision. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB decision.
Moving on from a veteran, bringing in a different quarterback and pairing him with an new play-caller might have ended the campaign in October. Instead, it shaped it. By the middle point of the season, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has cooled off after that time, dropping to 23rd in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the schedule, putting him just a single place ahead of peers.
Still
