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Usually, the NFL's Head Coach of the Year honor adheres to a simple formula. It often serves as a kind of apology. We regret we got wrong your team in our preseason predictions.

In theory, it's a direct trajectory: the coach who engineered the biggest turnaround wins the prize. In reality, it fuels an annual debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely honoring excellent leadership or simply the biggest upset.

Yet this year's race is fundamentally unique. The list of contenders is unusually talented. It has been the year of comebacks. The NFL has been chaotic, with reigning division winners falling away and recent underperformers improving collectively. Under an ordinary season, a coach guiding the his team to the summit of the conference would make him the overwhelming front-runner. But in such a wild and entertaining year, he's competing with several other exceptional coaches.

Below is how the projected ballot could be structured.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, 11-5

Voters for Coach of the Year voters adore quarterbacks. History shows this. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. If you solve a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach didn't merely fixed his young quarterback; he's freed him. Given a proper system, the QB has been given the opportunity to demonstrate his special talent. Since Week 9, the Bears rank number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a brief surge – it's prolonged performance. With his guidance, Williams has become increasingly confident, less reckless, and has willingly surrendered to the scheme instead of going rogue. It is an offense designed entirely in the coach's vision: a bully-ball ground attack, a steady helping of play-action passes and a imaginative aerial game that creates wide-open targets consistently. Williams has capitalized. And when clear throws haven't been available, he's been able to conjure magic from broken plays.

Johnson came to the Bears with a defined offensive philosophy. Almost each bet – rebuilding the offensive line, highlighting the pass-catchers, transforming the QB into a rhythm passer – has succeeded. That's uncommon for a first-year skipper. And it's rarer still for a coach who entered the organization with the kind of hype he did. For two straight offseasons, he was the most sought-after name on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, he has lived up to the hype – and even exceeded them. He's proven not just to be a offensive genius but the kind of culture builder that can breathe new life into an organization.

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

The area where his candidacy runs a bit into trouble is on the defensive side. The Bears currently rank in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on turnovers, and turnovers are notoriously unreliable. Defensive minds can stress ball disruption, but no one 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 defense's work. 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 established for long-term winning. However Johnson comes up just short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, Their Record

Coen is in a comparable situation to his counterpart. He's another first-time head coach who has orchestrated a rapid resurgence. Over the stretch run of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best all-around ball of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defense that now sits at number five in the NFL in EPA per play.

Even more notably, he has mastered the intangibles aspects, which was not a guarantee following his initial public appearances and some of his preseason moves.

Coen walked into Jacksonville with an uncommonly inexperienced staff. Unlike Johnson, who packed their staff with the ideal coaching cocktail of youth and veteran savvy, Coen hired newbies. Starting with the leader on down to assistants to position coaches, the Jaguars are filled with rookies. That type of approach is intriguing on paper, but often collapses in practice – as past failures are a warning – because everyone is learning a new job in real-time. But he has managed to bring the entire group and everything together.

After an early strong beginning, there was a possibility that the campaign would veer off the track. A midseason setback caused the team wobbling once more. That's usually when coaches panic and change too much. He didn't. Rather, he streamlined things. Jacksonville stopped chasing explosive plays and started hunting sustainable ones. The coach refocused the attack around key players and the running game, and encouraged Lawrence to use his legs more often.

The results are obvious. The Jaguars have won multiple games consecutively and will be the conference's No 3 seed. He gets the tiniest deduction in the standings because he took over a skilled team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that talent.

3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record

Each Strong of the Year case has a defining moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB move.

Moving on from a incumbent, bringing in a different quarterback and pairing him with an new offensive coordinator could have derailed the season in the early weeks. Instead, it shaped it. Through the middle point of the season, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player front-runner. 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.

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