Dave Canales sat on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in San Pedro, Calif. His wife, Lizzy, was by his side, seven months pregnant. They packed sandwiches and the day was clear enough to see Catalina Island off the coast. It was 2009, and the Canaleses’ coaching dreams felt somewhat uncertain. The couple took a moment to reflect.
Pete Carroll, who had given Canales a low-level job the year before at USC had taken off to coach the Seattle Seahawks. Canales raced with thoughts about what he’d have to do to survive a regime change under new head coach Lane Kiffin, amid the cutthroat lower rungs of a big-time program.
The silver lining of trying to stay with the Trojans was that he could remain anchored to his family nearby and the church his grandfather founded, Mission Ebenezer. There, Dave coordinated the music. Dad, Isaac, was the pastor. Mom, Ritha, was (and still is) an assistant pastor and director of the welcome team. Older brother Josh was primed to take over. Younger brother Coba would be a pastor there, too.
Just a year before, Canales was the special teams and tight ends coach for El Camino College. Two years before that, the offensive coordinator for Carson High School. Two years before that, he was running a start-up business selling Rudy Lara cowboy boots, humping a supply to trade shows across the United States and venturing down to Mexico to give input on popular styles. A family friend had given him the job right out of college, never even having seen him wear the things. The friend just assumed that, after seeing Canales around the church, he could handle inventory, packaging, selling and ordering. He was right.
Back on the cliff, Dave and Lizzy joined hands and prayed for guidance. Maybe they could stay in California and deepen the lives that they had started to build. Canales had a standing offer to work in commercial real estate if coaching didn’t work out. He could make a lot of money and put the swimming pool in his parents’ backyard that they had always dreamed of (this was a running family joke, seeing as Josh was a professional baseball player at one point, and Dave could have been a business titan, and could buy them a pool). Lizzy had always done whatever it took, serving as the family’s breadwinner coaching cheerleaders at El Camino while Dave applied for limited-earnings positions or graduate assistant jobs. That would never change.
Or, he could simply double-down on what he felt he was born to do. Canales’s mother remembered him at age 5 holding a pink, see-through clipboard in their small living room, setting up a team of siblings and friends, ordering them around. Once, when Canales was 10, the head coach of his flag football team was late to the game, and Ritha had to take the whistle. She told her son to figure it out, and for 20 minutes, Davey ran the show, no problem.
After they had finished praying, they opened their eyes. About a hundred feet away, a bird had swooped in off the coastline and perched on a nearby tree. Dave crept close to take a picture with his flip phone.
It was an osprey. Nickname: the sea hawk. Point taken. Canales, those who know him say, was overwhelmed by a feeling of peace. Two weeks later, Carroll called Canales from the Senior Bowl and offered him a job in the NFL.
“God had his hand on Davey all the time,” says Rudy Lara, the friend who hired Canales to run his cowboy boot business. “It was evident.”
Last Monday, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeated the Philadelphia Eagles in the wild-card round of the NFL playoffs, Canales called plays for one of the most surprising units in football. The Buccaneers lost in the divisional round to the Lions on Sunday, but none of that matters now after the Panthers hired the former Buccaneers OC as their next head coach Thursday. Canales, who is Mexican American, is now the lone head coach in the NFL of Hispanic descent, continuing a small but proud fraternity that has included Tom Flores and Ron Rivera.
Before the season, the Tampa Bay job was one that a handful of more-tenured coaches and coordinators turned down, scared away by the prospect of having to run an offense through Baker Mayfield or Kyle Trask, and replacing the aura of the greatest player in NFL history, Tom Brady.
Canales rose through Seattle’s receivers room alongside some of the team’s best at the position, such as Doug Baldwin, Jermaine Kearse and Tyler Lockett. He became the quarterbacks coach for two straight Russell Wilson Pro Bowl years, the passing-game coordinator during what was arguably Wilson’s best season, and the quarterbacks coach again when Geno Smith won Comeback Player of the Year in 2022. Now, Mayfield is piloting an offense that finished the regular season fifth in passing touchdowns, 10th in net yards per attempt and is one of the best big-play outfits in the league. He is also a candidate for Comeback Player of the Year.
The rest of the football world is just now starting to figure out what the Canales family, steeped in the art of the miracle, already knows: There is no stopping answered prayers.
