14. Caleb Williams/Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears
What a year it was for the Chicago Bears. After a majorly dysfunctional 2024 season, which was Caleb Williams’ rookie campaign, the Bears ‘won’ the head coach sweepstakes in 2025, making the right hire in Ben Johnson.
Let’s talk about Williams first. While the completion percentage decreased, Williams tossed more touchdowns in 2025 and continues to simply not throw interceptions. He was also sacked a lot less, so we saw tangible progress from the now third-year player.
Williams has the makeup to be a truly elite quarterback, but we’ll need to see that completion percentage rise, the winning to continue, and for it all to come together in 2026. He’s on the cusp of this, though, and the sharp-minded Johnson is going to help him get there.
Johnson now has years of stellar, top-10 offensive success as a coach in this league, even dating back to his days with Detroit. It was only one year, so I’m not going to get carried away and rank them higher than they need to be.
At the same time, not a single soul would be shocked if the Bears built on 2025 and ended up winning more in 2026.
13. Joe Burrow/Zac Taylor, Cincinnati Bengals
We have seen this duo in the playoffs in two separate seasons, making it to the title game, at minimum. In 2021, the Cincinnati Bengals had a bit of a Cinderella run to the Super Bowl and almost won it all. The Bengals came out of nowhere.
In 2022, they followed that up with a trip to the AFC Championship Game, but the playoffs have evaded the Bengals since, so this duo takes a hit for that reason and falls outside our top 10. Not only has Joe Burrow struggled to stay on the field consistently, but what has Zac Taylor done to be viewed as a great head coach?
I would say that Burrow is doing a ton of the heavy lifting here, but his inability to stay on the field for a full 17 games consistently is a huge issue. With the Bengals front office having gone out in free agency and aggressively improved the defense, this could be a year similar to 2021, which would be ideal for both Burrow and Taylor, who could be playing and coaching for a lot this year.
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