The Way This Strange Season Broke the Traditional Coach of the Year Mould.
Usually, the National Football League's Coach of the Year trophy follows a straightforward pattern. It often serves as a kind of apology. Our apologies we underestimated your squad in our preseason forecasts.
On paper, it's a clear-cut line: the coach who engineered the largest turnaround is handed the award. However, it sparks an annual debate about expectations and whether we're genuinely honoring excellent coaching or merely the most shocking shock.
However this year's competition is distinctly unique. The list of candidates is unusually talented. It has been the season of resurgences. The league has been chaotic, with recent conference champions declining and recent strugglers ascending together. During an normal season, a coach guiding the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the clear favorite. But in such a chaotic and entertaining year, he's competing with multiple other exceptional candidates.
Below is how the hypothetical ballot ought to shake out.
5) Ben Johnson, His Team, Their Record
Voters for Coach of the Year selectors love signal-callers. They always have. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. When you transform a quarterback, you're well on your way home.
Ben Johnson not only corrected his young quarterback; he's freed him. Within an ideal environment, Williams has been given the chance to display his special ability. Since Week 9, the Bears sit at number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a hot streak – it's sustained excellence. Under Johnson, the quarterback has become increasingly decisive, far less careless, and has eagerly surrendered to the system rather than improvising. It is an attack built solely in Johnson's vision: a bully-ball run game, a consistent dose of play-action passes and a imaginative passing attack that creates wide receiver targets consistently. The QB has capitalized. And when easy reads haven't been available, he's been capable to conjure big plays from nothing.
The coach arrived to the Bears with a specific offensive blueprint. Almost each bet – overhauling the offensive line, highlighting the tight ends, transforming Williams into a timing-based passer – has worked. That's uncommon for a first-year 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 cycles, he was the top name on the coaching market. But when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are zero guarantees. Remarkably, he has lived up to the hype – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not only to be a offensive genius but the kind of culture builder that can breathe new life into an franchise.
During a normal year, Johnson would be the clear-cut choice. But the current isn't a typical season!
The area where Johnson's case runs slightly into trouble is on the defensive side. The Chicago defense presently sit in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are living on takeaways, and takeaways are notoriously inconsistent. Coaches can focus on ball disruption, but no one can ensure it. He is on the ballot because the offense is sustainable. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defensive heavy lifting. With a few bounces of the ball, the Bears would be several victories worse off. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is established for long-term winning. However he comes up just short here.
4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record
The Jaguars' coach is in a similar spot to his counterpart. He's another first-time head coach who has orchestrated a rapid turnaround. During the crucial final weeks of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest overall ball of his career. And he's also overseen the remaking of a defense that now ranks fifth in the NFL in EPA per play.
Even more notably, Coen has mastered the off-field stuff, which wasn't a certainty after his early public introduction and some of his offseason moves.
The coach walked into Jacksonville with an uncommonly inexperienced coaching staff. In contrast to Johnson, who packed their staff with the perfect coaching mix of new ideas and veteran savvy, he hired newbies. Starting with the head coach on down to assistants to position coaches, the Jaguars are filled with first-timers. That type of setup is exciting in theory, but frequently collapses in reality – as past failures are a warning – because everyone is figuring out a new job on the fly. But Coen has pulled the entire group and all elements into sync.
After an initial hot beginning, there was a risk that the campaign would veer off the track. A mid-year setback had the team stumbling once more. That's usually when leaders overcorrect. He didn't. Rather, he simplified the approach. Jacksonville stopped pursuing home-run answers and started hunting reliable ones. Coen recentered the offense around his playmakers and the running game, and asked Lawrence to use his legs more.
The outcomes are evident. The Jags have won seven games consecutively and will be the conference's No 3 playoff seed. He gets the slightest deduction in the standings because he inherited a skilled roster, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that roster.
3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record
Every Coach of the Year argument has a pivotal moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback decision.
Moving on from a incumbent, bringing in a new signal-caller and pairing him with an new offensive coordinator might have ended the season in the early weeks. Rather, it shaped it. Through the middle point of the season, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player front-runner. He has cooled off after that hot streak, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per dropback over the second half of the schedule, putting him just a single place ahead of peers.
Still
