Isn't that also pretty much true for college football? It's why college basketball coaches are larger than life, but in the NBA they're basically a fungible commodity. Football isn't that much different, though some NFL coaches--Belichick mainly--have developed the same sort of synonymous identity with their team. It isn't as much anymore. If you think of every dynasty, though, there's a coach whose identity represented that organization for that period: Paul Brown, Vince Lombardi, Al Davis, Chuck Noll, Tom Landry, Don Shula, Bud Grant, John Madden, Bum Phillips, Don Coryell, Chuck Knox, Bill Walsh, Joe Gibbs, Bill Parcells, Mike Ditka, Marty Schottenheimer, Dan Reeves, Buddy Ryan, Jerry Glanville, Jimmy Johnson, Bill Cowher, Barry Switzer, Mike Holmgren, Brian Billick, Mike Shanahan, Tony Dungy, and Bill Belichick. It took me very little effort to reel off all of those names, and I'll bet that anyone 40+ years old looks at each of those names and has a fairly well developed image of the team(s) he was coaching, and that image is tied to that coach. With the guys from the 60s and 70s, it's almost impossible to think of that team without thinking of the coach, but I don't think that that's true in the NFL anymore except in a small handful of exceptions. See if that holds true for your memory of some of the recent Super Bowl teams (besides the Patriots, of course): Broncos in '13? Broncos in '15? Panthers? Falcons? The Harbaugh brothers and Pete Carroll buck the trend, but you get the point. None of those other coaches are expected to be with that team for a full generation. I'm a Rams fan, and I would have a hard time identifying all of their coaches between Mike Martz and Jeff Fisher, for example. Is it the time or the success that causes us to remember them? Would I have remembered Switzer if it weren't for his time at Oklahoma? It takes the sort of successes that a Cowher, Dungy, Belichick, and Carroll have had to stay put for a decade or more, but even then Jimmy Johnson didn't make it that long with the Cowboys, and almost all of the 80s coaches didn't last that long.
In college football and basketball, if you don't have the larger-than-life coach, you probably don't draw the players. Incidentally, I've always thought that this was part of what was working against Solich, Pellini, and pretty much all of the Nebraska basketball coaches. In professional sports, it doesn't work that way.
