How The Unusual Season Broke the Traditional Coach of the Year Mold.
Usually, the National Football League's Coach of the Year trophy follows a straightforward pattern. It commonly serves as a kind of mea culpa. We regret we underestimated your franchise in our pre-campaign forecasts.
On paper, it's a direct line: the skipper who oversaw the largest resurgence wins the award. In practice, it fuels an yearly discussion about expectations and whether we're actually rewarding superior coaching or merely the biggest shock.
But the current competition is fundamentally different. The list of candidates is exceptionally deep. It has been the campaign of resurgences. The league has been messy, with reigning division champions declining and longtime also-rans improving together. Under an ordinary year, Sean Payton leading the Denver Broncos to the top of the conference would make him the clear front-runner. Yet in this chaotic and fun year, he's up against multiple other outstanding candidates.
Below is how the hypothetical ballot should shake out.
5) The Chicago Bears Coach, Chicago Bears, 11-5
Coach of the Year voters adore signal-callers. History shows this. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. Should you solve a quarterback, you're well on your way to winning the award.
The Bears' head coach not only fixed his young quarterback; he's freed him. Given a proper system, the QB has been given the chance to showcase his rare talent. From midseason onward, the Bears rank fourth in offensive EPA per play. That's not a hot streak – it's consistent excellence. With his guidance, the quarterback has become increasingly confident, less reckless, and has eagerly submitted to the system rather than going rogue. It is an attack built solely in the coach's vision: a bully-ball ground attack, a heavy helping of play-action passes and a imaginative aerial game that springs wide-open receivers all over the field. The QB has taken advantage. And when openings haven't been available, he's been able to conjure magic out of broken plays.
The coach came to Chicago with a specific offensive vision. Almost each gamble – rebuilding the trenches, utilizing the tight ends, turning the QB into a rhythm passer – has succeeded. This is rare for a rookie skipper. And it's rarer yet for a coach who walked into the building with the level of expectations Johnson did. For two straight offseasons, he was the hottest name on the coaching market. However when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are no guarantees. Somehow, Johnson has lived up to the hype – and even exceeded them. He's proven not just to be a scheme wizard but the type of culture builder that can inject new life into an franchise.
In a typical season, he would be the clear-cut favorite. Yet this is not a typical campaign!
The area where his candidacy runs slightly into trouble is on the defensive side. The Bears presently sit in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on takeaways, and turnovers are notoriously inconsistent. Defensive minds can stress ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. He is on the ballot because the offense is legitimate. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defensive work. With a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be several victories behind. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is established for sustained success. However Johnson falls just short in this ranking.
4) Liam Coen, His Team, Their Record
Coen is in a comparable spot to his counterpart. He's another rookie head coach who has engineered a rapid resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest all-around ball of his career. And he's also overseen the remaking of a defensive unit that now sits at fifth in the NFL in EPA per play.
Even more notably, Coen has mastered the leadership aspects, which was not a guarantee after his initial public appearances and some of his offseason decisions.
The coach took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally inexperienced staff. In contrast to other coaches, who packed themselves with the ideal coaching blend of new ideas and experience, Coen bet on newbies. Starting with the leader himself to assistants to position coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with rookies. That kind of setup is intriguing on paper, but frequently fails in reality – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everyone is learning a new job in real-time. Yet he has managed to bring everyone and everything into sync.
After an early hot start, there was a possibility that the season would go off the rails. A midseason setback caused the Jags stumbling once more. That's typically when coaches panic and change too much. Coen did not. Instead, he simplified the approach. The offense stopped chasing explosive plays and started hunting reliable ones. Coen recentered the attack around key players and the ground attack, and encouraged Lawrence to use his mobility more often.
The outcomes are evident. The Jaguars have won multiple games consecutively and will be the conference's No 3 seed. Coen gets the slightest knock in the rankings because he inherited a skilled roster, but he has proven he can maximize that roster.
3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, His Team, Their Record
Every Coach of the Year narrative has a hinge moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his quarterback move.
Parting ways from a veteran, bringing in a different quarterback and partnering him with an new offensive coordinator might have derailed the campaign in the early weeks. Rather, it made it. By the mid point of the year, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player front-runner. He has fallen away since that hot streak, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the season, putting him just a single place ahead of other QBs.
Still
