A subtle change has been taking place through the years in the NFL, and it is one reason the Patriots and Giants are in the Super Bowl – and the 49ers and Raiders are at the bottom of the league.

It’s all about organizations now.

Football always was the ultimate team game, but, in the old days, before computer study and before coaches called all the plays, it was a game much more dependent on star power.

Oh, sure, the great quarterback could lift a team and still can. But now, it’s the structure within an organization that creates a team that makes the difference.

The late Bill Walsh recognized this and built a strong organizational foundation to go along with Joe Montana, Jerry Rice and the others. Walsh surrounded himself with strong football men. The Raiders never have recognized this. The current 49ers’ owners have not recognized this.

New England owner Robert Kraft and the Giants’ owners, the Mara and Tisch families, long ago understood this dynamic. It’s the same reason the Rooneys in Pittsburgh so rarely change coaches and remain a success. It’s the reason the Eagles have been successful in recent years. It’s the reason the Dolphins hired Bill Parcells to rebuild their organization from the top.

Too many teams try to build from the bottom, and that’s the wrong approach. Churning the roster and changing coaches don’t do any good if the organization itself is crumbling.

The 49ers have shifted titles instead of hiring people. They have deluded themselves into thinking the same people can fix what they haven’t managed to fix in three years. The Raiders are so far lost they barely rate mention in the same breath with the rest of the NFL.

Kraft was criticized when he pursued Bill Belichick to be his coach, but Kraft knew Belichick from the 1996 season, when Belichick worked for Parcells with the Patriots. Kraft gives Belichick the same rein that Eddie DeBartolo once gave Walsh, and with similar results.

The game has become much more complex. Free agency and the salary cap are a big part of the reason, obviously, but there is a difficult to quantify sea change in the attitude of today’s professional athletes. Maybe it’s the money, the adulation, the public persona. I remember working in Pittsburgh in the ‘60s and ‘70s as the Steelers’ dynasty was just beginning. The players actually left the team after the season because they worked real jobs in the off-season. They were much more in touch with reality than today’s athletes.

In the old days, coaching experience was not as important. Twenty-eight of the first 31 Super Bowls were won by teams whose coaches were on their first head-coaching job, and it was usually still early in their careers. These first-time coaches had prepared, they were fresh and they generally got the staff of assistants they wanted because they had spent years building lists of names.

But that’s not how it works in this era. Players are harder to control. Coaches make so much money that even if a head coach leaves, owners are hesitant to pay off all their assistants, so a new coach frequently inherits a staff or at least part of a staff. If he is experienced enough, he can deal with it and mold the new assistants to his way of doing things.

From the 1966 through the 1996 seasons, only two coaches, Weeb Ewbank with the Jets in the 1968 season and Don Shula with the Dolphins in the 1972-73 seasons, won the Super Bowl with their second teams.

But Sunday will mark the 9th time in the last 11 Super Bowls that it happened. Bill Belichick already has won three times on his second job, Mike Shanahan twice, plus Jon Gruden, Dick Vermeil and Tony Dungy. The only first-time coaches to win in the last decade were Brian Billick with Baltimore in the 2000 season and Bill Cowher with Pittsburgh in 2005.

A former NFL general manager once explained it to me.

“We are in an era that has cheapened experience and age in every profession,” he said. “There is no substitute for having gone through it.”

In an interview several years before his death last summer, Bill Walsh told me, “A good part of (succeeding) is experience and understanding the so- called dynamics between ownership, management and coaching and the media, and I think that exposure and experience (to the NFL) certainly serves somebody very well. Even Vermeil’s experience paid off for him 15 years later coming back.”

This Super Bowl, which matches Belichick and Tom Coughlin on the sidelines, will be just the second Super Bowl matching coaches who were previously fired (Shanahan vs. Dan Reeves in Denver-Atlanta after the ’98 season was the other).

“The second time around, I think it enables the coach to be able to better prepare himself to control the players, to be able to understand their feelings,” said Chris Mara, a Giants’ vice president. “It’s a different type of player now than it used to be.”

“A lot of young guys get jobs who really haven’t proven themselves yet, because they become the flavor of the month. The bottom line is a lot of them aren’t prepared for that next step. Sometimes, you hit on them, and sometimes, you don’t.”