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Typically, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year award adheres to a straightforward pattern. It commonly functions as a form of apology. Our apologies we misjudged your franchise in our preseason predictions.

On paper, it's a clear-cut path: the skipper who engineered the biggest resurgence wins the prize. However, it sparks an annual argument about expectations and whether we're actually honoring excellent leadership or merely the most shocking shock.

Yet the latest race is profoundly unique. The list of contenders is remarkably strong. It has been the year of turnarounds. The NFL has been unpredictable, with recent conference champions falling away and longtime also-rans ascending in unison. Under an normal season, a coach leading the his team to the summit of the conference would make him the stone-cold favorite. Yet in this wild and thrilling season, he's up against several other elite coaches.

Here is how the hypothetical ballot could look.

5) Ben Johnson, His Team, 11-5

Coach of the Year voters are fascinated by quarterbacks. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. A third in 2022. If you transform a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach not only corrected Caleb Williams; he's unlocked him. In the right ecosystem, Williams has been afforded the chance to demonstrate his special talent. Since Week 9, the Bears rank number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a lucky run – it's consistent performance. With Johnson, the quarterback has become more decisive, less reckless, and has willingly surrendered to the gameplan instead of going rogue. It is an offense designed solely in the coach's image: a physical ground attack, a consistent helping of play-action passes and a creative passing attack that creates wide-open targets all over the field. The QB has thrived. And when clear throws weren't there, he's been capable to spin big plays out of nothing.

Johnson came to Chicago with a defined offensive blueprint. Virtually every gamble – overhauling the offensive line, highlighting the pass-catchers, transforming the QB into a timing-based passer – has paid off. This is uncommon for a rookie head coach. And it's rarer still for a coach who walked into the organization with the kind of hype Johnson did. For two straight cycles, he was the hottest name on the head coaching carousel. However when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are no guarantees. Remarkably, Johnson has met expectations – and even exceeded them. He's proven not just to be a scheme wizard but the type of leader that can inject new life into an franchise.

During a normal year, Johnson would be the runaway favorite. Yet this isn't a normal campaign!

The area where Johnson's candidacy comes slightly into trouble is on defense. The Chicago defense presently rank in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are surviving on takeaways, and turnovers are notoriously inconsistent. Coaches can stress creating turnovers, but no one can guarantee it. He is on the ballot because the offense is legitimate. He's ranked lower because variance is doing an outsized share of the defensive heavy lifting. If not for a couple bounces of the ball, the Bears would be two wins behind. It's been an exceptional transformation, and the core is established for long-term success. But he comes up short in this ranking.

4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable spot to Johnson. He's a fellow rookie leader who has masterminded a rapid turnaround. Over the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the finest overall ball of his professional life. And he's also spearheaded the overhaul of a defense that now ranks fifth in the league in EPA per play.

Even more impressively, Coen has excelled at the leadership stuff, which was not a guarantee following his initial press conference introduction and some of his preseason moves.

Coen took over Jacksonville with an uncommonly inexperienced coaching staff. In contrast to Johnson, who surrounded their staff with the perfect coaching blend of new ideas and experience, Coen bet on newbies. From the head coach on down to coordinators to assistant coaches, the Jags are filled with first-timers. That kind of setup is exciting in theory, but frequently collapses in practice – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everybody is figuring out a new job on the fly. But Coen has pulled the entire group and all elements together.

After an initial strong start, there was a possibility that the season would go off the rails. A mid-year setback had the team stumbling again. That's typically when leaders panic and change too much. He didn't. Instead, he streamlined things. Jacksonville stopped chasing home-run answers and started seeking sustainable ones. Coen refocused the attack around key players and the ground attack, and encouraged his QB to use his mobility more.

The results are clear. The Jags have won multiple games consecutively and will be the conference's number three seed. He gets the slightest knock in the standings because he took over a skilled roster, but he has proven he can maximize that talent.

3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record

Each Strong of the Year argument has a pivotal moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his QB move.

Parting ways from a incumbent, signing a different signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative offensive coordinator could have derailed the season in the early weeks. Instead, it made it. By the middle point of the year, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player contender. He has fallen away since that hot streak, slipping to 23rd in EPA per dropback over the second half of the season, placing him just a single place ahead of other QBs.

Still