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Ordinarily, the NFL's Head Coach of the Year award follows a straightforward formula. It often functions as a type of mea culpa. Our apologies we underestimated your franchise in our pre-campaign forecasts.

In theory, it's a clear-cut path: the coach who oversaw the most dramatic turnaround receives the award. However, it creates an yearly debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're actually honoring superior coaching or just the most shocking shock.

Yet the latest competition is profoundly unique. The group of candidates is unusually strong. It has been the year of turnarounds. The league has been chaotic, with reigning division winners falling away and longtime underperformers rising collectively. In an normal year, Sean Payton guiding the his team to the summit of the conference would make him the overwhelming front-runner. Yet in this chaotic and thrilling season, he's facing five other elite coaches.

Here is how the hypothetical ballot could look.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, 11-5

Voters for Coach of the Year voters love QBs. They always have. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. Should you fix a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.

Ben Johnson hasn't just fixed his young quarterback; he's freed him. Given a proper environment, the QB has been afforded the chance to showcase his special talent. From Week 9, the Chicago offense sit at fourth in offensive EPA per play. That's not a lucky run – it's consistent excellence. With his guidance, Williams has become increasingly confident, less careless, and has willingly surrendered to the gameplan instead of improvising. It is an offense built entirely in Johnson's vision: a bully-ball ground attack, a steady dose of play-action passes and a imaginative aerial game that frees wide receiver targets everywhere. The QB has capitalized. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been capable to create big plays from broken plays.

Johnson arrived to Chicago with a defined offensive vision. Almost every bet – rebuilding the offensive line, featuring the tight ends, transforming the QB into a timing-based thrower – has paid off. This is rare for a first-year head coach. And it's rarer still for a coach who entered the organization with the immense expectations he did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the top name on the coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a leader, there are no sure things. Remarkably, Johnson has met the hype – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not only to be a offensive wizard but the type of leader that can breathe fresh energy into an franchise.

During a typical season, Johnson would be the runaway favorite. Yet the current isn't a normal campaign!

The area where his case comes slightly into trouble is on defense. The Chicago defense currently sit 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on takeaways, and takeaways are famously unreliable. Defensive minds can focus on creating turnovers, but nobody can ensure it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offense is real. He's ranked lower because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. With a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be several wins behind. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is in place for long-term winning. However Johnson falls short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, Their Record

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable situation to Johnson. He's a fellow rookie head coach who has orchestrated a rapid resurgence. During the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the most complete overall ball of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defensive unit that now ranks fifth in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

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

Coen walked into Jacksonville with an exceptionally inexperienced coaching staff. In contrast to other coaches, who packed themselves with the perfect coaching blend of new ideas and experience, Coen bet on first-timers. Starting with the leader on down to assistants to position coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That kind of approach is intriguing on paper, but often fails in reality – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everybody is learning a new job in real-time. Yet Coen has pulled the entire group and everything into sync.

After an early hot start, there was a possibility that the season would veer off the track. A midseason collapse had the Jags stumbling again. That's typically when coaches panic and change too much. He did not. Rather, he streamlined the approach. The offense stopped chasing home-run plays and started hunting reliable ones. The coach refocused the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and encouraged Lawrence to use his mobility more.

The outcomes are obvious. The Jaguars have won seven games in a row and will be the AFC's No 3 playoff seed. He gets the tiniest deduction in the standings because he took over a skilled roster, but he has proven he can get the most out of that roster.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3

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

Parting ways from a veteran, signing a different quarterback and partnering him with an new play-caller might have ended the campaign in October. Instead, it shaped it. By the mid point of the season, the new QB was an MVP candidate. He has fallen away after that time, slipping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the latter part of the season, putting him only a single spot ahead of peers.

Still