What does it mean to be the Coach of the Year?

Part of my PFWA membership is that I get to vote on the PFWA’s awards after every season is over. I did not do so last year because I was raising an infant and didn’t really think my view as “guy who only watches Texans games” was completely impartial. But this year I am asking myself to revisit the task and treat it with an appropriate amount of concern.

So here’s where I’m at: There are several coaches that I think could be worthy of coach of the year by some definition. If this were purely “who overcame expectations the most?” then the award would almost certainly have to be Kevin O’Connell’s, right? Because very few people saw the Sam Darnold renaissance coming, and even those who were willing to give some credence to it probably didn’t think it would wind up going this well. Certainly if you look at the history of the award from the PFWA side, I think it aligns very well to answer this question. DeMeco Ryans won last year, Brian Daboll won in 2022, and Mike Vrabel won in 2021.

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I certainly wouldn’t see O’Connell as an unworthy winner. At the same time, I never have really found the idea that “the coach that overperforms preseason expectations is the easy winner of this award” all that appealing as a philosophy. So I want to put my other main candidates up here and explain what about them is appealing to me.

Dan Campbell

Campbell tied for the NFL lead in games won. The weird thing about casting a vote for Campbell is that Ben Johnson might win assistant coach of the year … and also that Aaron Glenn might win assistant coach of the year. Both of them make up two of the top three names in the coaching carousel as far as interviews requested and buzz, right next to Mike Vrabel. I think that voters will use that as an excuse to not vote for Campbell, but I believe it actually is a reason to vote for him. Campbell and Brad Holmes align well to get the right players in to keep things chugging along even as the Lions defense loses three players a game, some of which never return, to the point where the Lions defensive IR would themselves be a good defense. Johnson might be the one calling the plays, but it’s Campbell’s determination in going for fourth downs doggedly and aggressively that I think help sets the culture of that unit. (Under Johnson, the unit minors in “fucking around and being cute,” which let me be honest: I love it, but I’m worried it will blow up at the wrong time.)

And then I think about how great coaches never wind up with this award. Andy Reid won the award once from the PFWA. In 2002. Bill Belichick didn’t win the award from 2010 on. The last time the coach with the most wins won the award was in 2019, when John Harbaugh first set Lamar Jackson loose on an unsuspecting AFC. Kyle Shanahan has never won the award. Mike Tomlin has never won the award. Matt LaFleur has never won the award. But there was a five-year stretch where Ron Rivera won the award twice, Bruce Arians won the award twice (not for winning a Super Bowl!), and Jason Garrett won it. I think Arians has a fringe Hall of Fame case. I’d be a little surprised if Rivera made it. I will not say anything about Jason Garrett because I am smart enough to not say things about other NBC Universal employees, particularly ones that make much more money than me.

All of which is to say: I think it’s really funny that there’s a 15-2 team run by a guy who loves to push the aggression meter and go for it as much as the analytics would tell you to — even more often than the analytics tell you to — and yet that somehow is never the story we’re told about the Lions. Everyone could not wait to put Branden Staley in a coffin, first the traditionalists, then the analytics people who he betrayed. But instead the story about Campbell that gets presented is purely one of a cultural change. Kneecap biting instead of ruthless mathematical efficiency. The best operation? Has both.

Mike Tomlin

Speaking of guys who get no credit. My sense is that the Steelers fade is going to give Tomlin absolutely no chance at this award. To me, that’s preposterous. The Steelers lost four games in a row, yes, but they lost four games in a row against the Eagles, Ravens, Chiefs, and a molten-hot Joe Burrow in a win-or-go home scenario. Those are three of probably the six best teams in the league, and then a quarterback who is playing like one of the three best in the league — who Tomlin did a pretty good job against! When you look back at that game against the Bengals, Tomlin even bucked tradition and was a little more aggressive than he usually was in the second half. It cost the Steelers three points, but I think you can argue that going for it on fourth-and-1 on his side of the field was the correct call.

Tomlin brought in a new offensive coordinator from the outside after years of depressing us with Matt Canada, and I would argue it worked as well as it possibly could have. The Steelers finished 19th in offensive DVOA despite not having a single NFL skill position player that scares you besides George Pickens — and even then it’s debatable which team Pickens will scare that day. I’m a big fan of Russell Wilson’s resurgence, which I saw as wildly unlikely, but nobody who watched the Denver Broncos the last two years would be surprised that the Steelers passing offense was vulnerable to bad days towards the end of the season.

There’s kind of an everpresentness to Tomlin’s last few years that makes this feel more like a lifetime achievement award. The Steelers have been flying by with some bullshit since Ben Roethlisberger lost his fastball. But it has never been this bad from an offensive talent perspective, where we’re pointing at games from Calvin Austin and hoping that there might be more there. And they entered Week 18 locked into the playoffs anyway.

Sean McDermott

I don’t think McDermott gets enough credit for being willing to be more aggressive this year. And while I think some of the Bills fans rhetoric gets a little overexaggerated about how “overlooked” they were this year, they definitely came into this year with real question marks at wideout and with everyone wondering about how they’d run McDermott’s defense with most of the spine of the defense (Matt Milano on IR most of the season, Jordan Poyer in Miami, Micah Hyde semi-retired like Eric Weddle) incapacitated.

Well the answer on offense was: They just bludgeoned everyone with the run game. The most famous offensive play of the Bills season was a Josh Allen scramble to knock off the Chiefs. They have literally Josh Allen and had the seventh-fewest passing attempts in the NFL. Their offensive line melded together to become one of the league’s best despite having to replace Mitch Morse. They used a ton of six-lineman looks. And they wreaked havoc on play-action passes. Sometimes their receivers didn’t play up to competition — as they did in Houston — but otherwise it was a uniquely hard offense to stop. A lot of that is about the MVP candidate, yes. But they still shifted away from letting said MVP candidate throw the ball in a major way that has worked. They finished second in offensive DVOA.

And the defense was, while I wouldn’t say vintage, just fine. They don’t have a true game-wrecker pass rusher. They rely heavily on Christian Benford and Taron Johnson to keep quick passes covered. Dorian Williams wasn’t ideal and I would even go so far as to say Milano came back missing a step. The talent on this unit is pretty poor. But they play above it with McDermott, as they always have.

Dan Quinn

Here’s one thought that keeps popping back up in my head: Are the people who are voting O’Connell just too cowardly to vote for Quinn because he doesn’t have 14 wins? I think you can argue that Dan Quinn was fighting a deeper established cultural problem walking into the Dan Snyder mess. Now, is it true that they have Jayden Daniels, and is it true Jayden Daniels looks like a franchise quarterback today? It is. Would you have said the same thing about C.J. Stroud last year in the same sort of no-hesitation-required way? I think you would have. My point being: We won’t be married to that QB evaluation if he has a down 2025, so why are we anchored to it as a fact of life today like we know for sure what Daniels will be?

I have a lot of inherent respect for Dan Quinn because he dramatically improved after the Falcons fired him. He could have taken the Gus Bradley path, been nice to everybody for the rest of his life and run the same defense forever. Instead he turned the Cowboys defense into a menace. He got this job, and, look at this defense:

With all due respect to Payne and Allen, this team has zero threatening edge players, is starting 34-year-old Bobby Wagner, and just generally had no known star level talent coming into the season. They traded for Marshon Lattimore at the deadline and he a) barely played due to the hamstring that has poisoned his year and b) when he did play committed pass interference against A.J. Brown literally every snap.

There are teams that finish 23rd in defensive DVOA and it feels disgusting — the Commanders are holding on for dear life every week. Quinn doesn’t have the Brian Flores story on defense, but I would argue he has less talent to work with. There was also an awful lot of mocking of Kliff Kingsbury as offensive coordinator — your truly was convinced that was a mistake — and now Kingsbury’s offense and offensive line look so good that he’s pulling head-coaching interviews again.

Andy Reid, Sean McVay, Matt LaFleur, John Harbaugh, Nick Sirianni

When I say that I could see any of ten guys winning it, this is what I mean. Patrick Mahomes may be the on-field force that gets all the credit and makes it impossible for Reid to get any respect, but shouldn’t we acknowledge that this team went 15-2 despite a complete lack of juice? It is interesting to be in an era (as compared to when I started writing about football in 2009) where everyone sees everything, and we see what Reid’s offense does and it’s ugly. You don’t want to reward it. At the same time, what is good coaching but somehow winning 15 games when your offense is this gross? But we’re punishing Reid rather than rewarding him for breaking new ground in the Pythagorean overperformance zone.

Speaking of ugly, McVay has Matthew Stafford, Puka Nacua, and Cooper Kupp, and that offense scored 44 points in three major wins to close out the season and get the NFC West crown. And yet, how many coaches have rallied from 1-4 to make the playoffs? How many coaches win a game one week 44-42 and another the next 12-6?

LaFleur dealt with Jordan Love’s numerous injuries and the lack of a No. 1 wideout all year. He talked Romeo Doubs off the ledge when he wasn’t getting the ball enough. He turned Malik Willis, one of the worst quarterbacks I’ve seen through two seasons, into a presentable backup quarterback product that won two starts and finished a third game with a win.

Then you have Harbaugh, who masterminded a midseason change with Kyle Hamilton at deep safety that changed the entire tenor of their defense and made the team a contender again. And Sirianni, who grew a defense worthy of winning the Super Bowl after a tough start. I don’t think either of them are quite “afterthoughts” in the race, but particularly after all the bad vibes the Eagles were supposed to have this year, they went 14-3 and it sure seems like nobody wants to acknowledge that Sirianni deserves some credit for that. Hell, instead people are acting like he might be fired if they lose in the first round.

I don’t know what this award really is for, and that’s the problem

But I do know that I don’t want it to be solely about beating preseason expectations. And I do know that even saying that, O’Connell deserves a ton of credit and that I wouldn’t see him as an undeserving winner. Frankly, any of these 10 coaches I named could win and I’d nod and not think twice about it. And I’m willing to be swayed on coaches past that!

Trying to decide what to weight and what to believe in as far as the evaluation of coaches: is it the totality of their dominance, how strictly they adhere to coaching orthodoxy, how they evolve their units, how they overcome their weaknesses? Is it how much they overperform their raw numbers, or overperform the talent on the field? It all winds up feeling like a black box where I’d need unprecedented access and literal months to comb through the data that would create to have a real answer.

Instead we’ve settled on one answer: Who beat their Vegas over/under by the most?

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