There’s a new offensive coordinator in Tampa Bay and there will be a new quarterback as well, just perhaps not Kyle Trask, the one — and only — signal-caller on the Buccaneers’ roster in late February.
It matters not to Dave Canales, who was introduced as the Buccaneers’ new OC on Wednesday. To him, the Bucs’ second-round pick in 2021 with one NFL game under his belt is the heir apparent to Tom Brady in Tampa.
“The way that I’ve been trained is, ‘They’re ours until they’re not,’” Canales said. “So, right now, I’ve got one Buccaneers quarterback — it’s Kyle Trask.”
Let the training commence.
“The thing that we’re going to help Kyle continue to build on here is to just be a point guard,” Canales said. “Point guards don’t have to be the one to score all the points — you just distribute. Play on time, get the ball out of your hands, life is better that way when you do that.
“You’ve got these bears chasing you and if you don’t like bears chasing you, get rid of the ham — and that’s the football, right? So just teaching him those principles, allowing him to be a distributor,” Canales added.
Canales replaces Byron Leftwich, who was let go as part of a massive overhaul of the coaching staff after the Bucs lost in the wild-card round to the Dallas Cowboys on Jan. 16. Since then, Brady called it a career.
Canales himself has a learning curve — he hasn’t called plays in the NFL or at the collegiate level, noting it was a “concern” he had to address during his interviews with the Bucs and head coach Todd Bowles.
“I really respect the play-calling position. I respect how hard it is,” Canales said. “I respect the skill that the guys that I worked for, that they had to have the mastery of the gameplan and the call sheet. I know that I’m going to take some lumps and have to learn my lessons along the way, but I’ll learn quick. I am a quick study.
“It’s something that I am really excited about. I really have been champing at the bit just trying to get an opportunity.”
However, Canales also said play-calling is not the “hardest part” about the job.
“The hardest part about this job is creating a culture, creating a language, teaching my coaches what the system is so they can give me good information and then teaching them how to communicate it to the players, making sure that our language stays consistent,” Canales said. “No synonyms, we say it like this. High and tight — that’s how we talk about ball security.
“The play-calling is just fun. That is the part that is like the payoff at the end of the week.”
The Bucs replaced their entire offensive coaching staff, including the hire of Skip Peete — let go by the Dallas Cowboys last month — as their new running backs coach. The team brought back Jeff Kastl as offensive quality control coach after parting ways with him originally.
Canales, 41, served as the Seahawks’ wide receivers coach from 2010-17. He was the team’s quarterbacks coach the following two seasons, then spent two seasons as Seattle’s passing game coordinator before moving back to quarterbacks coach last year.
–Field Level Media
