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Typically, the National Football League's Coach of the Year award follows a simple formula. It commonly serves as a kind of apology. Our apologies we got wrong your squad in our pre-campaign predictions.

On paper, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the skipper who orchestrated the largest improvement wins the award. In reality, it sparks an annual debate about preseason outlooks and whether we're genuinely rewarding superior leadership or just the greatest upset.

Yet the current field is distinctly different. The group of nominees is unusually strong. It has been the campaign of turnarounds. The NFL has been unpredictable, with recent division champions fading and longtime strugglers ascending in unison. In an ordinary year, a coach guiding the Denver Broncos to the summit of the AFC would make him the overwhelming favorite. But in such a turbulent and thrilling season, he's facing several other elite coaches.

Below is how the projected ballot could be structured.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, Chicago Bears, 11-5

Voters for Coach of the Year selectors are fascinated by signal-callers. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. Should you fix a franchise QB, you're halfway to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach not only fixed Caleb Williams; he's freed him. Within an ideal ecosystem, Williams has been given the opportunity to demonstrate his special talent. Since Week 9, the Bears rank number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. That's not a lucky run – it's sustained excellence. With his guidance, the quarterback has become more decisive, less careless, and has willingly surrendered to the gameplan instead of freelancing. It is an attack built solely in Johnson's image: a bully-ball run game, a heavy dose of play-action and a creative aerial game that creates wide-open targets all over the field. Williams has thrived. And when easy reads weren't available, he's been able to conjure magic from nothing.

The coach arrived to the Bears with a clear offensive blueprint. Almost every gamble – overhauling the offensive line, highlighting the tight ends, turning Williams into a timing-based thrower – has paid off. That's rare for a first-year skipper. And it's rarer still for a coach who walked into the building with the kind of pressure he did. For two straight offseasons, he was the most sought-after name on the coaching market. However when it comes to hiring a leader, there are no guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has met expectations – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a offensive wizard but the kind of leader that can inject new life into an franchise.

During a normal year, Johnson would be the overwhelming favorite. Yet this is not a normal year!

Where his case comes a bit unstuck is on the defensive side. The Bears presently sit in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are living on turnovers, and turnovers are notoriously unreliable. Defensive minds can stress creating turnovers, but no one can guarantee it. Johnson is on the list because the offense is sustainable. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defensive heavy lifting. If not for a few bounces of the ball, the Bears would be several wins behind. It's been an remarkable transformation, and the core is established for sustained winning. But Johnson comes up short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, His Team, Their Record

Coen is in a comparable spot to Johnson. He's another first-time head coach who has masterminded a swift resurgence. Over the crucial final weeks of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the most complete overall football of his career. And he's also overseen the overhaul of a defense that now ranks number five in the league in Expected Points Added per play.

What's more impressively, Coen has nailed the leadership stuff, which was not a given following his early public appearances and some of his offseason decisions.

The coach took over the Jaguars with an uncommonly inexperienced staff. In contrast to Johnson, who packed their staff with the perfect coaching blend of youth and experience, he hired newbies. Starting with the leader himself to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are stocked with first-timers. That kind of approach is intriguing on paper, but frequently collapses in reality – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a their job on the fly. Yet he has managed to bring everyone and all elements together.

After an early strong beginning, there was a possibility that the season would veer off the track. A mid-year collapse had the team wobbling once more. That's usually when leaders panic and change too much. He did not. Instead, he simplified things. The offense stopped pursuing home-run plays and started seeking sustainable ones. The coach refocused the attack around his playmakers and the ground attack, and asked his QB to use his legs more.

The outcomes are evident. The Jaguars have won multiple games in a row and will be the AFC's No 3 seed. He gets the tiniest knock in the standings because he inherited a talented team, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that roster.

3) Mike Macdonald, His Team, Their Record

Every Coach of the Year case has a defining decision. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB move.

Moving on from a incumbent, bringing in a different signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator might have ended the season in October. Rather, it shaped it. By the mid point of the season, the new QB was an MVP front-runner. He has regressed since that time, dropping to 23rd in EPA per dropback over the latter part of the season, placing him just a single spot ahead of other QBs.

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