Pete Carroll says protégé Dave Canales will show Panthers ‘what they can become’

New Panthers coach Dave Canales spent 13 years as a Seahawks assistant working under Pete Carroll, and with a staff full of similar transplants from the Pacific Northwest, it's easy to cast Carolina as Seattle South.

Those Seahawks teams made the playoffs 10 times, won five division titles and made the Super Bowl twice, winning a championship and nearly another. Finding anything close to that success in Charlotte would be remarkable, especially with Canales taking over a team that had the worst record in the NFL last year at 2-15.

Carroll, now 72 and 30 years removed from his first season as an NFL head coach, said the 43-year-old Canales has set himself up for success.

"He's way better prepared as a young head coach than I was," Carroll said by phone last week. "I was totally unprepared. It took me a while — I had to get kicked around enough before I got going. He's got a much better runway to starting this. He's well-versed, he knows what's going on, he's very articulate. 

"So much of it is how well you can convey the message, and he's a really good communicator. I'm totally jacked about watching him, because he's ready to go."

In Carroll's first season as an NFL coach, he went 6-10 with the Jets and got fired. His second stint, as the Patriots' head coach, featured a division title and winning record, but he was still fired after three years. The NFL is not a patient place, and his success in Seattle came only after nine years (and two national titles) at USC.

In his final season with the Trojans, Carroll hired Canales as a strength coach and video assistant. The two had met when Canales, then coaching at a community college in Southern California, worked part-time at Carroll's football camps. When Carroll left for