The NFL’s Coach of the Year award is simple. It typically serves as a mea culpa. We’re sorry our preseason predictions about your team were wrong.
In theory, it’s a straight line: the coach who oversaw the biggest turnaround is handed the award. In practice, it’s a yearly argument about expectations and whether we’re rewarding actual coaching or just the greatest surprise.
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But this year’s race is a little different. The pool of candidates is unusually deep. It’s been the season of turnarounds. The league has been messy, with recent division winners falling away and recent also-rans all rising together. In an ordinary year, Sean Payton guiding the Broncos to the top of the AFC would make him the stone-cold favorite. But in a chaotic, fun year, he’s up against five other exceptional candidates.
Here’s how the ballot should shake out.
5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, 11-5
Coach of the Year voters love quarterbacks. They always have. Sean McVay in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. If you fix a quarterback, you’re halfway home.
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Ben Johnson hasn’t just fixed Caleb Williams; he’s unlocked him. In the right ecosystem, Williams has been given a chance to showcase his otherworldly talent. Since Week 9, the Bears rank fourth in offensive EPA per play. That’s not a hot streak – it’s sustained excellence. Under Johnson, Williams has become more decisive, less reckless, and has willingly turned himself over to the scheme rather than freelancing. It is an offense built solely in Johnson’s image: a bully-ball run game, a heavy dose of play-action and a creative passing attack that springs wide-open receivers everywhere. Williams has taken advantage. And when openings haven’t been there, he’s been able to spin magic out of nothing.
Johnson arrived in Chicago with a clear offensive vision. Almost every bet – rebuilding the offensive line, featuring the tight ends, turning Williams into a rhythm thrower – has paid off. That’s rare for a first-year head coach. And it’s rarer still for a coach who walked into the building with the kind of expectations Johnson did. For two straight cycles, he was the hottest name on the coaching market. But when it comes to hiring a head coach, there are no sure things. Somehow, Johnson has lived up to expectations – and even exceeded them. He’s proven not just to be a scheme dork but the kind of culture builder that can breathe new life into an organization.
In a normal year, Johnson would be the runaway favorite. But this isn’t a normal season!
Where Johnson’s candidacy comes (slightly) unstuck is on defense. The Bears currently sit 25th in defensive success rate. They are living on turnovers, and turnovers are famously unreliable. Coaches can emphasise ball disruption, but no one can guarantee it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offense is real. He’s not higher because variance is doing too much of the defensive work. With a couple of bounces of the ball, the Bears would be two wins worse off. It’s been an exceptional turnaround, and the foundation is in place for long-term success. But Johnson comes up short here.
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4) Liam Coen, Jacksonville Jaguars, 12-4
Coen is in a similar spot to Johnson. He’s another first-time head coach who has engineered a rapid turnaround. Over the stretch run of the year, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best all-around ball of his career. And he’s also overseen the remaking of a defense that now ranks fifth in the league in EPA per play.
Even more impressively, Coen has nailed the off-field stuff, which wasn’t a given after his goofy opening press conference and some of his offseason decisions.
Coen walked into Jacksonville with an uncommonly raw staff. Unlike Johnson, who surrounded himself with the perfect coaching cocktail of youth and experience, Coen bet on newbies. From the head coach himself to coordinators to position coaches, the Jags are filled with first-timers. That kind of setup is exciting in theory, but often collapses in practice – Nathaniel Hackett’s Broncos are the cautionary tale – because everybody is learning a new job on the fly. But Coen has pulled everyone and everything together.
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After an initial hot start, there was a chance that the season would go off the rails. A midseason collapse against Houston had the Jags wobbling again. That’s usually when coaches overcorrect. Coen didn’t. Instead, he simplified things. Jacksonville stopped chasing explosive answers and started hunting sustainable ones. Coen recentered the offense around Jakobi Meyers and the running game, and asked Lawrence to use his legs more.
The results are obvious. The Jags have won seven games in a row and will be the AFC’s No 3 seed in the playoffs. Coen receives the tiniest knock in the standings because he inherited a talented roster, but he has proven he can maximize that talent.
3) Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks, 13-3
Every Coach of the Year case has a hinge moment. For Mike Macdonald, it was his quarterback decision.
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Moving on from Geno Smith, signing Sam Darnold and pairing him with offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak could have ended the season in October. Instead, it defined it. Through the middle point of the year, Darnold was an MVP front-runner. He has fallen away since that time, slipping to 23rd in EPA per dropback over the second half of the season, putting him just one spot ahead of JJ McCarthy and behind Baker Mayfield.
Still, the Seahawks continue to churn out wins. Macdonald nailed his three most important offseason decisions: quarterback, coordinator and identity. He also serves as the defensive play-caller for the second-ranked defense in the league. Without that defensive firepower, the Seahawks’ season would have come unstuck as Darnold hit his slump.
Seattle’s preseason win total was seven and a half. They are now the No 1 seed in the NFC, sitting on 13 wins, with the best point differential in the conference. If they beat the Niners on Sunday, they will lock up the one seed. In a brutal division, Macdonald hasn’t just exceeded expectations, he’s obliterated them.
2) Mike Vrabel, New England Patriots, 13-3
There are turnarounds, and then there is whatever Vrabel has done in New England. Last season’s Patriots weren’t just bad. They were directionless, devoid of talent and ideas. It looked like they were staring down a multi-year rebuild, hoping they could put anything around Drake Maye to find out what they had in the young quarterback. Instead, they’re the AFC East champs, have by far the conference’s best point differential and Maye is an MVP favorite.
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Sure, you can point to the Patriots’ historically weak strength of schedule to knock Vrabel. But that ignores the fact that the Patriots were hardly contenders to begin with. The schedule may be soft, but every team saw the Patriots as a weak spot on their schedule when the season started.
A roster that looked bereft of talent is now punching above its weight, relying on old hands, rookies and Maye to scrabble together 13 wins.
Vrabel’s fingerprints are all over the transformation. He had the final say on personnel last offseason, and almost every decision has been a hit. He brought back Josh McDaniels as offensive coordinator, not as a nostalgia play but to bring some professionalism back to the operation. When defensive coordinator Terrell Williams stepped away from the team to receive treatment for a cancer diagnosis, Vrabel handed the reins to the unknown Zak Kuhr to call plays while taking on more of the day-to-day responsibilities himself. On defense, the Patriots have been inefficient, but they’re fifth in points per game. Offensively, they’ve been a furnace blast. After drilling the Jets last week, they’re up to first in the league in EPA per play. Soft schedule or not, they’ve taken advantage.
Vrabel’s job this season was to make the Patriots respectable again. He’s done more than that. Even with a torrent of injuries, the Patriots are serious contenders with an MVP at quarterback.
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1) Kyle Shanahan, San Francisco 49ers, 12-4
What is the job of a head coach? It’s to put his players in a position to succeed and to find solutions when problems arise. Every other candidate on this list has done that, but no one has done it to the same degree as Shanahan.
No coach has dealt with more challenges than Shanahan. The Niners lost Nick Bosa and Fred Warner early in the season. They’ve played a chunk of the year without Brock Purdy and George Kittle. They haven’t had Brandon Ayiuk all year. Every week, another difference-maker has been out of the lineup with an injury. And yet they are 12-4, with a chance at securing the No 1 seed in the NFC in the last week of the season. Oh, and this after an offseason cap purge that stripped away core parts of the team’s recent core.
This is where expectation bias usually kills a candidate. Shanahan is supposed to be good. The 49ers are supposed to win. Barring a historic season, those coaches rarely get the gong. But this season should break the pattern. Putting together the sixth-ranked offense in the league when the only certainty has been Christian McCaffrey is a remarkable feat.
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This is the most adaptive version of Shanahan we’ve seen. The offense has shapeshifted weekly. The defense has survived on tenacity and vibes rather than stars. It hasn’t always been pretty, but it’s been effective.
Coach of the Year should reward the coach who solves the most difficult problems. This season, no one has solved more of them than Kyle Shanahan. Being even competitive in some games, given the injury challenges, has been a minor miracle. And now the Niners are healthy enough to be a problem in the postseason.
