Coach’s challenge

Dolphins’ coach can succeed, but is still on a learning curve

Hyde: Dolphins’ Adam Gase has talent to right ship, but will he?

Gase is smart enough to know mistakes have been made this year.

Today, Adam Gase continues as the sixth Miami Dolphins coach to do battle with the Bill Belichick. There will be a seventh at some point if Gase doesn’t correct problems and build a culture like the New England Patriots have.

It starts with understanding the order of job importance inside an organization:

1. Owner. He spends money, sets business blueprints and most importantly hires …

2. The grocery picker. Whoever drafts players, signs free agents and sets contract parameters needs the talent, vision and residue of luck to primarily find …

3. The quarterback. There are a dozen coaches who could win a Super Bowl at any time. There are five winning quarterbacks capable of carrying a team there and another five who can accompany one with enough surrounding talent.

4. The coach. Too low? Who are the two best coaches in football today? Belichick and Alabama’s Nick Saban. They win. They build and re-build. They also lost together in Cleveland for the same reason Saban did with the Dolphins. No quarterback.

That said, there’s a sleight of hand at work in football. The coach is presented as the most important piece, because he must be presented as such. He’s the daily voice of the franchise, the system-maker for Sundays and the lion tamer of a full roster of players. Everyone needs to see him as boss.

Gase has clear strengths in this role. He can succeed here. No doubt. But if last season showed his talent — adapting his strategy to players, giving the team a strong

personality — this year presented the learning curve he still needs to scale. Quickly, too.

Is he doing too much? Has he been too arrogant in his ways? Are things still as workable inside the organization as they attempt to present them to the outside?

We’ll see coming up. We’ll also see if Gase needs to take some off his plate considering he’s No. 2 and No. 4 on the list and sole decider on No. 3. His offense is a mess in a way only he can decipher. Yes, it crushed things when Ryan Tannehill went down in August. Give him that.

But give him the benefit of the doubt on bringing Jay Cutler out of retirement for $10 million considering the importance of quarterbacks. It’s other decisions. It’s staff decisions (Chris “cocaine platter” Foerster) to this odd offense (again, that’s on him) to trading Jay Ajayi (when Joe Philbin dumped talent it was a sign of doom) to long-reaching contract decisions.

Everyone points to the Ndamukong Suh deal for how unwieldy it is. It’s true. But at least he’s a great player. A newer problem is bloated contracts for defensive end Andre Branch (three years, $24 million) and linebacker Kiko Alonso (four years, $29 million) and spending $56 million for safeties over the next three years in Reshad Jones and T.J. McDonald.

Good organizations have confidence they can find players like Branch and Alonso on the open market for the same, cheap price as they originally got them. They should be as replaceable to you as they were to their previous teams. Why overpay?

What, too, is the Dolphins’ philosophy? We’re ending Year Two under Gase and there’s no foundational talent laid and the ideas are all over the place. He stated last offseason it was keeping your own players who have bought into the system.

But the only reason McDonald is a Dolphins was because he was suspended eight games by the league. He was then signed to a long-term deal months before even playing.

This has nothing to do with McDonald’s good talent. It has to do with setting a culture and paying impact players at impact positions. The Dolphins now have two, high-priced safeties and don’t have an average cornerback as Tom Brady surely saw on film this past week.

Gase is smart enough to know mistakes have been made this year. Getting Tannehill back will help — if a 30-year-old off knee surgery who still needs a progressive step remains the way to go. But he will only help.

It was Bill Walsh who said, “Organizations make quarterbacks.” Everything was built around Joe Montana, just as it was in New England for Brady to develop from a chaperon to the driver of the franchise.

We’ll see what Belichick built again today. He’s run off five Dolphins coaches. Gase has the talent to remain as the sixth. But he’d better start fixing things to do so.

WILFREDO LEE/AP Columnist Dave Hyde says Adam Gase, above, has the talent within himself to change the culture in Miami to sustained excellence, but the question remains whether it will happen.