FoxxyBrown1111 said:
Even Walsh would only have 9-7 seasons en masse if he hadn´t Rice & Co....
But the point is, he's the one who recruited Montana, Rice, Craig, Ronnie Lott, etc. The 49ers were one of the worst teams in the NFL in 1979, when Bill Walsh took over as HC. They won four SBs in the following decade. Of course having the right players was a large part of it, because after Walsh stepped down in 1988, George Siefert took over and led the team to another SB his first year. But Walsh was the one who recruited those players, and devised the system in which they played, and as they retired, the team declined. They did win another SB in 1994-5, with Steve Young as QB, but he was also recruited by Walsh. By the end of the 90s, Young was gone, so were most or all of the other players recruited by Walsh, and the team entered a long period of mediocrity or worse.
Jimmy Johnson led the Cowboys to two SBs in the early 90s, and was rewarded by being fired by their idiot owner Jerry Jones. New coach Barry Switzer managed to win another SB in his second year, with Johnson’s players, but no more after that, and the Cowboys have not been close to a SB since.
There are numerous other examples of head coaches in the NFL who had long successful careers, despite major turnover in key positions on the team: Vince Lombardi, Bud Grant, Tom Landry, Don Shula, Chuck Noll, Joe Gibbs (only coach to win three SBs with three different QBs), and Bellichik. All but Bellichik are retired, and the team went downhill after they stepped down. In some cases the decline might have begun while they were still coaching, but the point is, there was a long period of excellence associated with the team while they were there that was not sustained either before they arrived or after they left. You could also add Al Davis to this list, because he called many of the shots that coaches are ordinarily responsible for. There are other examples of coaches who moved around, and were successful wherever they went, like George Allen, Chuck Knox and Bill Parcells.
You can’t look at these associations and say that the coaches were not a big reason for the team’s success. You can debate how much of that success was due to the players they signed, how much to the system they devised, how much to getting the best out of the players, and how much to strategy in the game, but if the coach never arrived, the success would never have come. It's easy to say it's a much bigger picture, that management above the HC matters, but the most important decision management makes is choosing the HC, and one of the qualities of a great HC is the ability to work well with the management, indeed, usually to become a large part of it. Head coaches, like great players, may not be sufficient to build a winner, but they are necessary in a way that few other individuals are.
The Steelers may be an exception, because they have a long record of excellence involving several different HCs. But the usual situation in the NFL is that a team achieves great success with a HC that is not replicated after he leaves. If you look at all the NFL dynasties--Green Bay in the 60s, the Steelers in the 70s, the 49ers in the 80s, and to a lesser extent, the Cowboys in the 90s and the Pats in the 00s, the dominance began when a new HC was hired, and ended when the coach left.
In college, of course, where recruiting is much more critical, the coach is even more important. Texas is rumored to have offered Nick Saban $10 million to leave Alabama. If coaches are not a huge factor in a team's success, why would they try to pry away one who has a very good thing going where he is now?