When Mike McDaniel became the head coach of the Miami Dolphins last year, the former San Francisco 49ers offensive coordinator inherited Tua Tagovailoa as the NFL team’s quarterback, but perhaps only because team executives had failed in their attempts to replace the 2020 first-round draft choice.

Miami won’t have a first-round choice in the 2023 NFL Draft as punishment for tampering infractions, including contact with Tom Brady during and after the 2021 season about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers star becoming a limited partner, possibly an executive and maybe the quarterback for the team.

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Overlapping that clandestine operation, Dolphins general manager Chris Grier made a push to acquire Houston Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson at the 2021 trade deadline.

In contrast, McDaniel thought Tagovailoa would do well in his offense. And after studying the former Alabama All-American more closely, McDaniel became convinced he’d struck gold at quarterback.

The trick was to get the rest of the organization and Tagovailoa to believe it, too.

“We just moved in the direction of ‘All right, we’re empowering Tua,’” McDaniel said.

Tagovailoa led the NFL in passing-efficiency rating in the 2022 season. He also had the league’s best touchdown-pass percentage and the highest average gain per pass and per completion.

During an appearance on Volume.com’s “Open Mike with Mike Silver” podcast during the NFL’s annual meeting, McDaniel said he started by seeking to assure Tagovailoa that his new coach was in his corner in a way that his predecessor, Brian Flores, perhaps had not been.

“It was hard for me to look at him and not think of my experience,” McDaniel said. “In my experience in the world, shoot, I’m a head coach now, and I know where I came from. How did I even have a chance to even fulfill this overly ambitious vision or drive or dream that I had? And I knew I would have had no chance had I not been built up by my mom that ‘You know what? You can do anything. You are the smartest,’ whatever – everything a single mom would tell a child. I know at a young age, I gravitated to that. It gave me the confidence. We all have those moments where it’s like ‘OK, I don’t know what’s going to happen.’ So do you go into those moments of uncertainty with faith that you’re going to get it done or anxiety or apprehension that you’re going to fail? And I had gone through all those moments with just vigor and fearlessness because of how I had been built up.

“So I saw Tua like that. How can we even approach the idea of we know what this player is when I don’t know, from my vantage point, who does this guy have that believes in him. So we have to start with he has to know that someone’s 100 percent in his corner, which I see that’s what a coach is, and that ‘No, dude, you can do it,’ so I had to convince him that I believed in him so that he could in turn allow himself, because I had been through it.”

LISTEN TO THE “OPEN MIKE WITH MIKE SILVER” PODCAST FEATURNG MIKE MCDANIEL

While meeting with club personnel during his first offseason with the team, McDaniel said the consensus was that the Dolphins needed to spend on offensive linemen in free agency, but he “knew Tua needed skill-position players who were dynamic with the ball in their hand.”

“This dude is a point guard,” McDaniel said. “He has a gift that way.”

To illustrate the strength of his opinion to his co-workers, McDaniel decided to assemble a series of video clips of Tagovailoa passes to show the rest of the staff.

“As I progressed through the tape, I started to notice this trend,” McDaniel said, “and it’s like, ‘Wow, that’s like the seventh different out-break that I’ve watched Tua throw to the field.’ Just for a quick explanation of that: An out-break to the field, I see once or twice from a particular quarterback a season because the receiver’s running away from you, meaning the ball’s in the air longer, which is a higher risk for defenders to make up that ground, undercut and pick-6 for a catastrophic turnover. This is a high-risk throw that quarterbacks are very nervous to make. And he’s doing it. …

“I thought I knew. I didn’t even know what we were sitting on.”

McDaniel called Grier to set up a staff meeting to share the video of 150 passes.

“We are sitting on a gold mine,” McDaniel said he told Grier. “We need to do everything, everything we do moving forward should be skill-position players that have the ability to do stuff with the ball in their hands because this guy, if they’re open, he’ll get it to them.”

Within the month, Grier obtained wide receiver Tyreek Hill in a trade with the Kansas City Chiefs. The former West Alabama standout set franchise single-season records in 2022 with 119 receptions and 1,710 receiving yards.

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McDaniel also showed the video he’d assembled to Tagovailoa.

“It was the most extreme case of a person not knowing how to take a compliment,” McDaniel said. “You could tell he was not used to anything but overly constructive negativity, so he didn’t know how to take it. …

“It was the first building block. And then that on top of practice, tape and following suit once we got on the practice field, you could see a guy viscerally in front of you, like, ‘Maybe I am good.’”

The Dolphins’ problem with Tagovailoa last season wasn’t one of confidence but of concussions.

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In the 2022 season, Miami had an 8-4 record when Tagovailoa took most of the snaps. The Dolphins posted a 9-8 regular-season record and lost to the Buffalo Bills 34-31 in an AFC playoff game.

Tagovailoa sustained a concussion in the first half of the fourth game of the season, in which Miami fell to the Cincinnati Bengals 27-15 for its first loss of the season. Tagovailoa missed the next two games.

In the Dolphins’ 15th game, Tagovailoa threw three of his season total of eight interceptions in the fourth quarter of a 26-20 loss to the Green Bay Packers, and he re-entered the NFL’s concussion protocol the next day.

Tagovailoa missed Miami’s final two regular-season games and the playoff loss.

The Dolphins are scheduled to begin their offseason program on April 17.

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Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter at @AMarkG1.