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Usually, the NFL's Head Coach of the Year honor follows a straightforward script. It often serves as a form of mea culpa. Our apologies we misjudged your squad in our preseason projections.

On paper, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the skipper who engineered the biggest turnaround receives the prize. In practice, it sparks an yearly argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely rewarding superior coaching or merely the biggest upset.

Yet this year's competition is profoundly unique. The pool of nominees is unusually talented. It has been the season of comebacks. The league has been messy, with recent division winners falling away and longtime strugglers rising together. In an typical season, Sean Payton leading the his team to the summit of the conference would make him the overwhelming front-runner. But in this chaotic and entertaining season, he's up against five other outstanding coaches.

This is how the ideal ballot could shake out.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, His Team, Their Record

Voters for Coach of the Year voters love signal-callers. This is a tradition. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. If you solve a quarterback, you're well on your way home.

The Bears' head coach not only fixed his young quarterback; he's freed him. Within an ideal environment, Williams has been given the chance to demonstrate his otherworldly talent. Since Week 9, the Chicago offense rank fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a lucky run – it's prolonged performance. With his guidance, the quarterback has become increasingly confident, far less reckless, and has eagerly surrendered to the gameplan rather than freelancing. It is an attack designed entirely in Johnson's image: a physical ground attack, a heavy dose of play-action passes and a innovative passing attack that creates wide receiver targets all over the field. Williams has thrived. And when easy reads weren't there, he's been capable to create big plays out of nothing.

Johnson came to Chicago with a specific offensive blueprint. Virtually each bet – overhauling the offensive line, featuring the pass-catchers, turning Williams into a rhythm thrower – has succeeded. This is rare for a first-year head coach. And it's even more uncommon still for a leader who walked into the building with the level of pressure he did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the most sought-after candidate on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a leader, there are no guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has met the hype – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not just to be a offensive wizard but the type of leader that can inject new life into an organization.

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

Where Johnson's candidacy runs slightly into trouble is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense presently sit 25th in defensive efficiency. They are surviving on turnovers, and takeaways are notoriously unreliable. Coaches can stress ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is legitimate. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defense's heavy lifting. With a few breaks of the ball, the team would be several wins worse off. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is established for long-term winning. However Johnson falls just short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4

Coen is in a comparable position to Johnson. He's another first-time leader who has orchestrated a swift resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the finest all-around ball of his career. And he's also overseen the overhaul of a defense that now sits at fifth in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more notably, Coen has nailed the intangibles aspects, which was not a given following his early public introduction and some of his offseason decisions.

Coen took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally inexperienced coaching staff. In contrast to other coaches, who packed themselves with the perfect coaching mix of youth and veteran savvy, he hired first-timers. Starting with the leader on down to assistants to position coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with rookies. That kind of setup 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 Coen has managed to bring everyone and all elements together.

After an initial hot beginning, there was a risk that the campaign would go off the track. A midseason collapse had the team wobbling once more. That's typically when coaches panic and change too much. He did not. Rather, he streamlined things. Jacksonville stopped pursuing home-run answers and started seeking reliable ones. Coen refocused the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and asked Lawrence to use his mobility more often.

The results are obvious. The Jaguars have won seven games consecutively and will be the AFC's number three seed. Coen gets the slightest deduction in the standings because he took over a talented team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, 13-3

Each Strong of the Year argument has a pivotal moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback choice.

Moving on from a incumbent, bringing in a different quarterback and pairing him with an new play-caller could have ended the season in October. Instead, it defined it. Through the middle point of the season, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player candidate. He has cooled off after that hot streak, dropping to 23rd in EPA per dropback over the latter part of the schedule, putting him just one spot ahead of other QBs.

Still