This is the time of year when accolades are handed out, and two of the biggest are the league’s Most Valuable Player and the Coach of the Year awards. Let others debate the former, but the latter seems clear to me, although perhaps unlikely to others. The coach who did the best job under the most adverse conditions in 2005 is Bill Belichick, regardless of whether or not his New England Patriots successfully defend their Super Bowl title for the third straight time.

Strong cases can be made for Lovie Smith in Chicago, where he led a team to an 11-4 start despite playing, for all intents and purposes, without a quarterback for much of the season. Using defense and a two-pronged power running attack in a weak division, Smith whipped the Bears into a team whose defense was being compared with that of the sainted 1985-86 Bears that won one Super Bowl and was among the stingiest in pro football history. Hosannas to Smith, but he didn’t have to put up with what Belichick did this season, so he’ll have to take a seat slightly behind him.

Certainly Indianapolis’ Tony Dungy deserves accolades for leading his team to a 13-0 start and a brush with history, but his success has been a slow process of adding to a young defense each year while preserving an inherited offense that is one of the most explosive in football. Dungy is a great coach who has done a marvelous job retooling his defense into a stripped-down version of the one he built in Tampa that won Jon Gruden a Super Bowl, but he had far more weapons at his disposal all year than Belichick had with the injury-riddled team the Patriots put on the field for more than half the season.

Seattle’s Mike Holmgren has finally found a way for his underachieving Seahawks to soar. They have been dominant in many games and been tough-minded in most of the close ones. That is a reflection on them and on their coach that should not be ignored. They are perhaps the best team in the NFC, which come Super Bowl time may not be saying much but up until then says quite a lot. But should not this team have been playing more like this the last two seasons? With a superior runner in Shaun Alexander, a growing quarterback (whom Holmgren developed, by the way) in Matt Hasselbeck and a fast defense that is making plays, the Seahawks are finally ready to fly, and Holmgren deserves a lot of credit for that. But did he have to deal with all the changes Belichick did? Did he lose both his offensive and defensive coordinators, replace them with untested young assistants with no real résumés in play-calling and still find a way to make the postseason? No, which is a break for him and a reason why Belichick has earned the nod ahead of him this year.

What about Marvin Lewis in Cincinnati? He’s taken a perennial doormat to the penthouse of the postseason, a place the Bengals hadn’t reached in over a decade. Lewis not only had to rebuild the team, he had to rebuild the mindset of the organization, which had adopted a loser’s mentality as a matter of course. That has been difficult to overcome, but Lewis has done it, as is proven by the performance of his team this season. But Lewis’ resurrection job wasn’t simply about this year. It’s been a gradual process of building through the draft with high enough picks early to land someone like QB Carson Palmer, gambling by unloading unhappy and uncooperative veteran RB Corey Dillon to risk it all with younger and cheaper Rudi Johnson and building a defense like the ones he used to run in Baltimore and Washington with high draft choices.

Lewis did that and should be warmly regarded for it, but by 2005 all the blocks were in place for a big season, so all he had to do was not coach them to defeat. That is sometimes more difficult than it might seem, but it’s not as difficult as winning after six of the 10 defensive backs you began the year with, including a starting corner and a starting safety, end up on injured reserve and the soul of your defense, LB Tedy Bruschi, is lost for half the year while recovering from an offseason stroke. And did we mention both starting offensive tackles, the starting center and Dillon all going down for long stretches with injury, as well? Dealing with all that adversity had to be more difficult than having to listen to Chad Johnson yapping away every Sunday.

Down the highway in New York, former Belichick co-worker Tom Coughlin has done a tremendous job of turning around the Giants, and in Jacksonville the same is true of Jack Del Rio, who rebuilt Coughlin’s former team once it got old and began to fall apart and then held it together this year after losing QB Byron Leftwich for many weeks late in the season.

They, along with Smith in Chicago, should be Belichick’s primary competitors for Coach of the Year, but none had to cope with all the problems Belichick did.

None of them had to rebuild his coaching staff, offensive line, defensive backfield and inside linebacking corps on the fly while managing to stave off the corrosive effects of the unbridled success that comes from winning three of the last four Super Bowls. The easiest thing in the world would have been for players and coaches to have folded their cards at midseason and concluded, “It’s not our year.’’ They didn’t, and that is a credit not only to Belichick but also to his players, because they were the ones who had to hold things together in the locker room when their secondary was unraveling every Sunday and their play was consistently inconsistent for the first time since they won their first Super Bowl in 2001.

They all deserve credit for that, but when you are the captain of the ship, it tends to go where you steer it. This year, despite starting 42 different players, having a different defensive backfield on seven straight weekends, losing three of his five starting offensive linemen for a time, watching Dillon limp along at a pace that was less than half of his production of a year ago and spending a month without the best defensive lineman in the game, Richard Seymour, Belichick kept things afloat.

Winning when you have one of the best teams in the league, as Dungy and Holmgren have done, is one thing. It’s not easy, and you deserve credit for doing it. But continuing to win after long-term success with a depleted lineup and a coaching staff that was without the heads of both its offense and defense is a far more daunting task, and Belichick completed it. He did it well enough to get his team back into the postseason with an AFC East championship and at least one home playoff game. That’s what sets him apart from the rest. Regardless of who ends up in Detroit on Super Sunday, this has really been his finest coaching hour, and for that he deserves to be elevated above the rest.

Ron Borges is a columnist for the Boston Globe.

The above content is featured from our Pro Football Weekly print edition — Issue 25.

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By PFW staff, Dec. 31, 2005