How The Strange Season Broke the Traditional Coach of the Year Formula.
Ordinarily, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor follows a simple formula. It frequently serves as a kind of mea culpa. Sorry we underestimated your team in our preseason projections.
On paper, it's a direct line: the skipper who engineered the most dramatic improvement is handed the prize. In practice, it fuels an yearly debate about expectations and whether we're genuinely rewarding excellent leadership or just the biggest shock.
However the current field is distinctly unique. The list of contenders is exceptionally deep. It has been the season of turnarounds. The NFL has been unpredictable, with recent division champions fading and longtime strugglers ascending collectively. Under an normal season, a coach leading the Denver Broncos to the summit of the conference would make him the overwhelming favorite. Yet in such a turbulent and fun season, he's facing five other exceptional candidates.
Below is how the projected vote should shake out.
5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, 11-5
Voters for Coach of the Year voters adore QBs. They always have. Sean McVay in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. When you solve a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.
Ben Johnson not only corrected his young quarterback; he's unleashed him. Given a proper ecosystem, Williams has been given the chance to display his special ability. Since Week 9, the Chicago offense sit at fourth in offensive EPA per play. That's not a hot streak – it's consistent excellence. With his guidance, the quarterback has become more decisive, far less reckless, and has eagerly submitted to the gameplan instead of going rogue. It is an offense constructed solely in the coach's vision: a bully-ball run game, a heavy dose of play-action and a innovative passing attack that springs wide receiver receivers consistently. The QB has taken advantage. And when easy reads weren't there, he's been able to create big plays out of nothing.
The coach arrived to Chicago with a clear offensive blueprint. Almost each bet – rebuilding the offensive line, utilizing the tight ends, turning Williams into a rhythm thrower – has paid off. That's uncommon for a first-year skipper. And it's even more uncommon yet for a coach who entered the building with the kind of pressure Johnson did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the most sought-after candidate on the head coaching market. But when it comes to selecting a leader, there are zero sure things. Somehow, Johnson has lived up to expectations – and even exceeded them. He's proven not only to be a scheme dork but the type of leader that can breathe new life into an franchise.
During a normal season, he would be the clear-cut choice. But the current is not a typical year!
Where Johnson's candidacy runs a bit unstuck is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense currently rank in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on turnovers, and takeaways are notoriously inconsistent. Coaches can emphasise ball disruption, but nobody can guarantee it. He is on the ballot because the offensive production is real. He's ranked lower because variance is doing too much of the defensive heavy lifting. If not for a couple breaks of the ball, the Bears would be two victories worse off. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is established for sustained winning. However he comes up short in this ranking.
4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, His Team, 12-4
The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable situation to his counterpart. He's another rookie head coach who has masterminded a swift turnaround. During the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best all-around football of his career. And he's also spearheaded the transformation of a defensive unit that now ranks fifth in the league in EPA per play.
What's more impressively, he has nailed the leadership aspects, which was not a given following his early public appearances and some of his offseason decisions.
Coen took over the Jaguars with an uncommonly inexperienced staff. Unlike Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the ideal staff mix of youth and veteran savvy, Coen trusted newbies. Starting with the head coach himself to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with first-timers. That type of setup is intriguing in theory, but often collapses in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everyone is learning a new job on the fly. Yet Coen has managed to bring the entire group and everything into sync.
Following an early hot beginning, there was a chance that the season would go off the track. A mid-year setback had the Jags wobbling once more. That's typically when coaches panic and change too much. Coen didn't. Rather, he simplified things. The offense stopped pursuing explosive answers and started hunting sustainable ones. Coen recentered the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and encouraged his QB to use his mobility more.
The outcomes are obvious. The Jags have won seven games consecutively and will be the conference's number three playoff seed. He receives the slightest deduction in the rankings because he took over a talented team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that roster.
3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3
Each Coach of the Year argument has a defining decision. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback move.
Moving on from a incumbent, signing a different signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator could have ended the campaign in the early weeks. Instead, it shaped it. By the middle point of the year, the new QB was an Most Valuable Player candidate. He has regressed after that time, dropping to 23rd in EPA per pass attempt over the latter part of the schedule, placing him just a single spot ahead of other QBs.
Still
