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Ordinarily, the National Football League's Coach of the Year honor follows a simple script. It commonly serves as a type of mea culpa. Our apologies we underestimated your squad in our pre-campaign predictions.

In theory, it's a direct line: the skipper who orchestrated the most dramatic improvement wins the award. In practice, it sparks an annual argument about expectations and whether we're truly rewarding superior coaching or simply the greatest shock.

But this year's competition is distinctly unique. The list of contenders is unusually strong. It has been the campaign of turnarounds. The league has been messy, with reigning conference champions declining and longtime underperformers ascending in unison. During an normal year, Sean Payton leading the Denver Broncos to the top of the conference would make him the stone-cold favorite. But in this turbulent and fun season, he's facing multiple other exceptional coaches.

Below is how the projected ballot could look.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, 11-5

Coach of the Year selectors are fascinated by QBs. History shows this. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. When you transform a quarterback, you're well on your way home.

The Bears' head coach hasn't just fixed his young quarterback; he's freed him. Within an ideal ecosystem, Williams has been afforded the chance to showcase his otherworldly ability. From Week 9, the Bears rank fourth in offensive EPA per play. That's not a brief surge – it's sustained excellence. With Johnson, the quarterback has become more confident, far less reckless, and has willingly surrendered to the gameplan rather than going rogue. It is an offense constructed solely in the coach's image: a bully-ball run game, a heavy dose of play-action and a innovative aerial game that creates wide receiver receivers everywhere. The QB has thrived. And when easy reads haven't been available, he's been able to conjure magic out of broken plays.

The coach arrived to the Bears with a defined offensive blueprint. Virtually each gamble – rebuilding the trenches, featuring the pass-catchers, turning Williams into a timing-based passer – has paid off. That's uncommon for a first-year head coach. And it's even more uncommon yet for a coach who walked into the organization with the kind of expectations Johnson did. For consecutive straight cycles, he was the most sought-after name on the coaching carousel. However when it comes to selecting a leader, there are no sure things. Somehow, 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 leader that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.

During a ordinary year, Johnson would be the runaway choice. Yet this isn't a normal season!

Where his candidacy comes a bit unstuck is on defense. The Bears presently sit in the bottom third in defensive efficiency. They are living on takeaways, and takeaways are famously fickle. Defensive minds can emphasise creating turnovers, but no one can guarantee it. He is on the ballot because the offensive production is legitimate. He's not higher because variance is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. With a couple bounces of the ball, the Bears would be two victories behind. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the core is in place for sustained winning. However Johnson comes up short here.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, 12-4

Coen is in a similar position to Johnson. He's a fellow first-time head coach who has engineered a dramatic turnaround. During the crucial final weeks of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the most complete all-around football of his career. And he's also overseen the remaking of a defense that now ranks number five in the NFL in EPA per play.

Even more impressively, he has nailed the intangibles aspects, which wasn't a certainty following his early press conference appearances and some of his offseason moves.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an exceptionally raw staff. In contrast to Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the ideal coaching cocktail of youth and veteran savvy, he hired newbies. From the leader on down to assistants to position coaches, the Jaguars are stocked with rookies. That kind of setup is intriguing in theory, but frequently collapses in practice – with other teams are a cautionary tale – because everybody is figuring out a new job on the fly. But Coen has pulled everyone and everything into sync.

After an initial hot start, there was a risk that the season would go off the track. A mid-year setback had the team stumbling again. That's usually when coaches panic and change too much. He didn't. Instead, he streamlined things. The offense stopped chasing home-run plays and started seeking consistent ones. The coach recentered the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and asked Lawrence to use his mobility more often.

The results are evident. The Jags have won seven games in a row and will be the AFC's No 3 seed. Coen receives the slightest knock in the rankings because he inherited a talented team, but he has demonstrated he can maximize that talent.

3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3

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

Parting ways from a incumbent, bringing in a new signal-caller and pairing him with an new play-caller could have derailed the campaign in October. Instead, it made it. Through the mid point of the year, the acquisition was an MVP contender. He has fallen away after that hot streak, dropping to a lower rank in efficiency per pass attempt over the latter part of the schedule, putting him only one spot ahead of other QBs.

Still