How We Talk About the Best Coach in the NFL, Reevaluated

At this point, regular season awards in sports have become entirely arbitrary across the board to create fodder throughout the year.

They’re usually narrative-based, they’re voted upon by a committee that will not waver from some sort of stubborn ideology, and everyone has their own definition of subjective words such as “valuable” or “best.”

In the NFL, the Most Valuable Player has simply become a “best quarterback” award because the voters have decided the person with the ball in their hands the most is the person most responsible for winning and, therefore, the most valuable.

The offensive player of the year just gets demoted to the best offensive player who isn’t a quarterback by process of elimination, like an intramural award where we pretend that quarterback isn’t also a position that plays offense. “Good try, Hall of Fame caliber running back that changes the gameplan for the season entirely! Maybe next year you’ll be as valuable as your teammate who goes 18/24 for 200 yards on a routine basis!”

One that truly needs to be talked about is the Coach of the Year. Views of coaches vary from team to team because while they’re responsible for being the figurehead of success or failure, they’re not actually on the field.

Is it merely just not being a net negative and keeping the vibes of the players up on a consistently winning team? Is it doing more with less and overperforming on a team that was thought to be toward the bottom of the league? Is it calling plays that are unique and innovative and actually have the presence felt?

The award has had a rough history because we’ve gotten caught up in the moment so many times. Brian Daboll won in 2022, and the Giants have gone 8-18 since. Matt Nagy won in Chicago in 2018. Jason Garrett won in 2016. On the other hand, Bill Belichick only ever won the award three times during the Patriots’ dynasty, and for him to only be considered the best coach in the league for three years is just simply a charade.

The reality of the award is that there need to be two separate awards: Best Coach, given to the team with the coach who has made the team the most successful with his fingerprints all over both the offense and defense and Best Coaching JOB, given to the coach who had minimal expectations and coached the team to be far better than one would have ever expected.

PHOTO: Thomas B. Shea/Imagn Images

As it stands, the Best Coach Award would go to Dan Campbell of the Detroit Lions. People forget that when he was hired as the brute meathead with press releases about biting kneecaps, the hire was criticized as backward in the age of hiring the young wonderboy analytical mind. Yet, he has built a seemingly unstoppable force, which is why coaching matters. They’re 29-14 in their last three seasons after being at the doldrums of the NFC; they have coordinators who could be hired in a heartbeat but don’t want to leave because of how established the culture is, and they’ve drafted names like Penei Sewell,

Jahmyr Gibbs, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Sam LaPorta, and Brian Branch seemingly hit and received immediate returns. 

In the long term, it’s been a home run of hire as he’s built up the program, and this year has been the pinnacle. They’re 8-1 and use motion, and trick plays that purely make football exciting and innovative week after week. They’ve answered every question mark on both sides of the ball, averaging over 30 points per game and giving up under 20, even without Aiden Hutchinson.

In their worst game of the season, Jared Goff threw 5 picks, and they still gutted out a close win on the road in Houston, 26-23. The best teams find a way to still win on their F- grade day, and the defense stepped up in the second half to stop CJ Stroud from proving they can win in different ways.

From going for it on fourth down with a trick punt designed in a lab to use the entire offensive line as a unit for his two different kinds of backs to simply riding for the team through thick and thin, Dan the Man Campbell and the innovative identity he’s had to make the Lions a delight to watch this year as must-see television is why he’s been the Best Coach.

The Best Coaching Job has been Mike Tomlin and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

PHOTO: Geoff Burke/Imagn Images

Mike Tomlin has never won Coach of the Year despite never finishing with a record below .500 in 17 years. It’s been the calling card of his career- that despite the instability of some of the personalities like oft-injured Ben Roethlisberger, loose cannons like Le’Veon Bell and Antonio Brown, or having to pivot to backup quarterbacks like Duck Hodges and Mason Rudolph, Mike Tomlin’s Steelers can always win ugly and win games that they probably shouldn’t.

Going into the year, the Steelers were coming off of squeaking in as the last seed in the AFC and losing immediately, and the thought was that bringing in two sunk costs to fill the quarterback position, a flier on the youth of Justin Fields and the outcasted Ned Flanders character of Russell Wilson, there was high potential for this to finally be the year that Tomlin fails to reach the .500 record mark in a loaded conference with having to navigate two quarterbacks that were pulled off the scrap heap.

At 7-2 and the top of the division, he’s just got to win 2 more already. It’s a Tomlin masterclass.

Wilson began the season injured, yet Fields, coming off of the trade from a Bears franchise that cut their losses for Caleb Williams, held down the fort at 4-2 in his stead, just enough for the Steel Curtain defense to do what it does best. They’ve allowed the second-fewest points on the year, are a +9 in turnover differential this year, and play the usual Mike Tomlin disciplined, mistake-free football that gets under the skin of the fans who want to see fireworks for over 3 hours. 

Those Fields games weren’t exactly thrilling, and the world kept waiting for the carriage to turn into a pumpkin. In three of those games, they won without even having to score 21 points, but in stepped Russell Wilson. Tomlin received some criticism going from a 4-2 younger Fields that could still have an unproven ceiling to Wilson, a veteran now on his third team for a bargain deal, but the move just proved further that we should never doubt Tomlin’s decision-making as the Steelers are now scoring points! What a world for them to have an offense, too!

While everyone was rooting for the “corny” Wilson to fail, he’s 3-0, has a 105 passer rating on the year, and has unlocked Mike Williams and George Pickens with moonball sideline throws that we saw when Seattle appeared in Super Bowls.

Given the expectations, the many obstacles he’s had to juggle, and the pure hindsight of what he’s had to manage as a leader of so many different personalities, Mike Tomlin holds the belt of the best coaching job of the year.

It’s beyond impressive and palpably felt every Sunday how empowered his players feel in the Steel City.

PHOTO: Geoff Burke/Imagn Images