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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year award adheres to a simple formula. It often serves as a kind of mea culpa. Our apologies we misjudged your franchise in our preseason predictions.

Theoretically, it's a direct line: the skipper who engineered the largest turnaround receives the prize. In reality, it creates an annual debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're actually rewarding superior coaching or just the greatest surprise.

Yet the current competition is distinctly different. The group of nominees is unusually talented. It has been the season of comebacks. The league has been messy, with reigning conference winners falling away and longtime also-rans rising collectively. Under an typical year, Sean Payton leading the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the stone-cold favorite. But in this wild and fun season, he's up against several other exceptional candidates.

Below is how the hypothetical vote ought to look.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, His Team, 11-5

Coach of the Year voters love quarterbacks. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. If you solve a franchise QB, you're well on your way to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach didn't merely corrected Caleb Williams; he's unlocked him. Within an ideal ecosystem, Williams has been afforded the chance to display his rare talent. Since Week 9, the Bears rank number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's prolonged excellence. With Johnson, the quarterback has become increasingly confident, less careless, and has eagerly surrendered to the scheme rather than improvising. It is an offense built solely in Johnson's vision: a bully-ball ground attack, a steady dose of play-action passes and a innovative passing attack that frees wide receiver targets everywhere. Williams has thrived. And when easy reads weren't available, he's been capable to create big plays from broken plays.

Johnson arrived to the Bears with a specific offensive vision. Almost each bet – overhauling the trenches, highlighting the tight ends, transforming the QB into a rhythm passer – has succeeded. That's rare for a rookie head coach. And it's even more uncommon yet for a leader who entered the building with the level of hype he did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the most sought-after candidate on the head coaching carousel. But when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has lived up to the hype – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not just to be a scheme dork but the kind of culture builder that can inject new life into an franchise.

During a typical year, Johnson would be the clear-cut choice. But the current isn't a typical campaign!

The area where Johnson's case runs a bit into trouble is on the defensive side. The Bears currently sit in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are living on turnovers, and takeaways are notoriously unreliable. Defensive minds can stress creating turnovers, but nobody can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offensive production is real. He's not higher because luck is doing too much of the defense's work. With a few breaks of the ball, the Bears would be two victories behind. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the foundation is established for sustained success. But he falls just short in this ranking.

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

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable spot to his counterpart. He's a fellow first-time head coach who has orchestrated a rapid resurgence. During the crucial final weeks of the season, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best all-around football of his professional life. And he's also overseen the remaking of a defensive unit that now sits at number five in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more impressively, he has nailed the leadership aspects, which wasn't a given following his early press conference appearances and some of his offseason decisions.

The coach walked into the Jaguars with an uncommonly raw staff. Unlike other coaches, who packed their staff with the perfect staff cocktail of new ideas and experience, he trusted newbies. From the leader on down to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are filled with first-timers. That type of setup is intriguing in theory, but frequently fails in practice – as past failures are a warning – because everyone is learning a new job on the fly. Yet he has managed to bring everyone and everything into sync.

Following an initial hot start, there was a possibility that the season would veer off the track. A midseason setback caused the team stumbling again. That's typically when leaders overcorrect. Coen didn't. Rather, he streamlined things. The offense stopped chasing explosive plays and started seeking sustainable ones. Coen refocused the offense around his playmakers and the ground attack, and asked his QB to use his legs more.

The outcomes are evident. The Jaguars have won seven games in a row and will be the conference's No 3 seed. Coen gets the tiniest deduction in the rankings because he took over a talented team, but he has proven he can get the most out of that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3

Each Coach of the Year narrative has a defining moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB move.

Moving on from a incumbent, signing a different signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative play-caller might have ended the season in the early weeks. Rather, it made it. By the mid point of the year, the acquisition was an MVP contender. He has regressed after that time, dropping to 23rd in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the season, putting him only one place ahead of other QBs.

Still