"Where will the desk go?" Adam Gase asks his wife, Jen, as they tour the second floor of the home they're renting in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. "Are you putting me in here, or is this one of the kids' rooms?"

It's move-in day, and the Miami Dolphins' rookie head coach wants to know where he'll be sitting while watching film on those rare occasions when he's not grinding away at the team's training facility. He's not hauling a whole lot of boxes on this humid June afternoon, but in a figurative sense, Gase has a lot of experience getting his house in order. As an assistant coach in Denver and Chicago, he helped a dramatically diverse collection of quarterbacks -- from Tim Tebow to Peyton Manning to Jay Cutler -- optimize their talents. A couple of hours before checking out the new digs, he sat in his office going over play sheets with his latest obsession: Ryan Tannehill, the Dolphins' fifth-year quarterback, a player Gase believes is poised to make the jump from good to great.

Even before taking the Dolphins' job, as part of his interview process at the team's digs, Gase spent some time alone with Tannehill. They sat in a small meeting room and talked briefly, during which Gase assured him, "If I end up being the coach here, you're my guy -- end of story."

Recalls Gase: "I just wanted to make sure that if I ended up being the guy, he'd have no worries about it. I always look at it as, like, you want great alignment between the quarterback and the head coach [and/or] offensive coordinator, because that guy's gonna have to be kind of the torch carrier for what you're doing on offense. He needs to be almost like an extension of the coaching staff, because that's how involved these guys are now. I mean, there are very few guys that are probably not involved in game planning somehow, or not involved in some of the things that you do in practice. Every team's either looking for that guy, or trying to make the guy they have better."

Because that coach-quarterback collaboration is so comprehensive, and because the scrutiny of the men in both positions has become increasingly pronounced (and their respective shelf lives more tenuous), getting That Guy to run an offense has never been trickier. Buffalo Bills offensive coordinator Greg Roman has, over the past five seasons in San Francisco and Buffalo, had success coaching Alex Smith, Colin Kaepernick and Tyrod Taylor. Ask him why it's so hard to find an elite quarterback in 2016, and he replies, "Well, you're not asking me a hypothetical question; you're asking me a factual question. Because, what is it, 10, 12, people on this Earth can do it at a high level? It's a fact. So, why is that? Well, part of that is the speed of the game. That's never changed; it's always been a tough adjustment for most people. But now, the college game's so different than the pro game. The coverage is different; there's so much more multiplicity of defenses, and you have to read coverages instantly. Some of these spread systems that teams are running [in college] don't work on an NFL field with NFL players and NFL hashmarks. And the windows are so much tighter."

As Gase points out, so, too, are the employment windows for coaches and quarterbacks alike -- a reality that can have devastating effects on a young passer's development.

"What happens sometimes is, there's a coaching change, there's a system change, all of a sudden, he's learning something completely different -- starting over, almost," Gase says. "And you've seen good players have to take steps back because they're learning a new system. Now he can't get everybody else lined up; he's gotta worry about himself. It puts that guy in a worse position. I just keep thinking about Alex Smith -- how many systems did he play in? Then all of a sudden, Jim [Harbaugh comes to San Francisco], and they do a great job as far as using him to his strengths. And now he's in Kansas City, and he's part of the reason why they're able to do what they do. If you ever look at guys that stay in the system a long time, you'll see the turnovers going down, because they know where to go with the ball. It's almost like their offense is in the back of their mind, and they're more focused on what the defense is doing, and, What does the situation call for?"