As Head Coach Todd Bowles heads into his second season at the helm, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have filled a number of vacancies on his staff. This follows the departure of nine assistant coaches in January.
Dave Canales, formerly the Seattle Seahawks' quarterbacks coach, was introduced as the Buccaneers' new offensive coordinator on Wednesday. He'll be working alongside two other new additions to the offensive staff in wide receivers coach Brad Idzik and running backs coach Skip Peete. Thad Lewis, who spent the last two seasons with the team as an assistant wide receivers coach, has been promoted to quarterbacks coach.
The Buccaneers also added to their defensive staff with the hiring of outside linebackers coach George Edwards. In addition, Jeff Kastl who worked as an offensive quality control coach for the Bucs last year has returned to that same role.
Idzik follows Canales to Tampa from the Seahawks' staff, on which he spent the last four seasons, three of them as an assistant wide receivers coach. He also has a familial tie to the Buccaneers; his father, John, was a member of the Buccaneers' player personnel staff for 12 seasons (1993-2004). Idzik began his NFL coaching career in Seattle after five seasons as a graduate assistant at Stanford University.
Peete will head into his 35th season of coaching in 2023, including 25 at the NFL level, all as a running backs coach. He most recently finished his second sting in that role with the Dallas Cowboys from 2020-22, having previously held the same position from 2007-12). After stops at Pittsburgh, Michigan State, Rutgers and UCLA he jumped to the NFL with the Oakland Raiders in 1998. Following nine seasons with the Raiders he later worked for the Chicago Bears and Los Angeles Rams. In Los Angeles, he operated in the same offensive system as Shane Waldron, who became the Seahawks' offensive coordinator in 2021.
Lewis has been with the Buccaneers for the past three seasons, first as a coaching intern in 2020 before working with the wide receivers the last two years. Both Mike Evans and Chris Godwin surpassed the 1,000-yard receiving mark each of the past two seasons; prior to 2021 the Buccaneers' offense had featured two 1,000-yard receivers in the same season just twice in 45 seasons. Lewis played quarterback in the NFL, first signing with the St. Louis Rams as an undrafted free agent in 2010. A record-setting passer at Duke, he spent time with seven nine different teams over eight seasons and played in seven games with six starts.
Like Peete, Edwards was most recently on the Cowboys staff for the past three seasons and is also midway through his fourth decade as a football coach. His NFL career has spanned 25 seasons so far, beginning with the Cowboys as a linebackers coach in 1998. After four seasons in Dallas he had stops in Washington, Cleveland, Miami (twice), Buffalo and Minnesota and had stints as a defensive coordinator or co-defensive coordinator for Washington, the Bills and the Vikings. His most recent role in Dallas was as a senior defensive assistant. Prior to jumping to the NFL he coached collegiately at Florida, Appalachian State, Duke and Georgia.
