He was born to coach, perhaps, even starting while he was still playing for the
New York Giants, helping coach the defensive backfield.
He became "God's Coach", for "God's Team". Never mind that players like Lance Alworth and Lance Rentzel were quite unsaintly, and that the antics of many other such players made their way into slightly-fictionalized, best-selling accounts over the years. Even management people, such as Tex Schramm, were the Anti-Landry, a bunch of high-living Good Old Playboys; those were the people, after all, who gave us the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, and had they had their way, those women would have been something raunchier than what was actually presented - the slight sanitizing was done, perhaps, out of respect for Coach Landry.
As a kid, he annoyed me, seeming like your typical smug FCA icon, but consider that his influence basically saved the lives of cocaine-addicted players like Hollywood Henderson and Mercury Morris (though Duane Thomas was a lost cause), and players like Bob Lilly and Roger Staubach have become, while annoying, solid Landry-like role models for the next generation. Which is good, since we don't have Coach Landry any more.
He was the last coach to wear a suit and fedora on the sidelines, an anachronism at the time, but, in retrospect, in this age of massive corporate-sponsored clothing deals, in which all coaches dress alike in their team-colors endorsement-deal sweat suits, Landry's conservative throwback garb exuded class.