When Adrian Martinez committed to Tennessee on Friday afternoon, giving the Vols an elite quarterback prospect a year after they failed to sign a highly rated signal-caller in the 2017 class, the California star mentioned one name over and over and over in his interviews.
Mike Canales.
All of a sudden, one of the most puzzling assistant hires of Butch Jones’ tenure at Tennessee on the surface looked pretty good once the layers of Martinez’s recruiting story started peeling back. The words spoken by the Vols’ latest franchise quarterback to VolQuest’s Austin Price about the coach affectionately known as “Chico” made him sound like “The Man.”
[Yeah, that’s a ’70s TV reference, what of it?]
“I don’t think you have ever heard a bad word about coach Canales,” Martinez told Price. “I know I haven’t. He left such a great impression on myself and my family. He’s been nothing but positive and motivating throughout this whole thing. I’ve hit some adversity and he’s never changed. He was constantly positive and I felt like he was genuine and cared about me. I want to go to place that cares about their players.
“When I sat in the quarterback room without him in there, all the quarterbacks talked about how much he loves them as people and not just football. That’s huge.”
Say what you want about Jones, but the man has a ton of coaching contacts, and those have come in handy over his brief career with the Vols.
While Jones showed loyalty with his initial UT staff, he’s also proven he isn’t too sentimental to sever ties when things don’t go so rosy. Just ask former defensive coordinator John Jancek and offensive line coach Don Mahoney. Those deep connections to coaches all over the country also proved beneficial when it came time for Jones to replenish his staff with moves that the vast majority of folks have called upgrades.
One such offseason move — one of many assistant changes — that was met with nearly universal irritation was when Jones finally bit the bullet and decided to hire a quarterbacks coach [too late for the Joshua Dobbs era, I might add…] and chose — drumroll, please! — Mike Canales? If you read message boards around that time, you would have thought Canales’ mother made his middle name an expletive.
Yeah, it wasn’t pretty.
The 55-year-old veteran assistant who was previously at Utah State but spent time at Arizona, South Florida and North Texas, where he also wound up as the Mean Green’s head coach, wasn’t a “splash” hire by any means. The thing is, it may wind up being a pretty darn good hire.
Jones has known Canales for a long time. As a matter of fact, back in 2015 when Tennessee played a sleepwalking homecoming against North Texas and won 24-0, the two head coaches chatted each other up like best friends and embraced afterward. Jones lauded Canales’ coaching ability leading up to the game and afterward. It was man-crushing at its finest.
That lip-service turned out to be anything but throwaway comments two years later when Jones snatched up Canales for the all-important job of tutoring quarterbacks. That position and the decision on who starts for the Vols under center in 2017 could wind up being the decision that determines Jones’ future at UT. Choose the wrong one between Quinten Dormady and Jarrett Guarantano, and the program may take a downward turn. If those guys are not ready, what will that mean for the Vols?
That shows the importance of this hire and also the faith Jones has in Canales.
The jury on Canales, of course, is still out. Upgrading from nothing isn’t hard, and that’s essentially what UT had the past few years, employing a graduate assistant [though a pretty good one in Nick Sheridan] who was responsible for working with quarterbacks. Mike DeBord was a pretty good coordinator, but he was NOT a molder of signal-callers.
Canales was universally lauded this spring for his coaching, his personality and the way his quarterbacks gravitated toward him. He’s handled the QB battle between Dormady and Guarantano well so far, and in the rain-shortened Orange & White Game, the duo combined to complete 14 of their 15 pass attempts. There didn’t appear to be any glaring mechanical issues, and Canales’ laid-back demeanor seems to fit well on Rocky Top.
Anybody having that much time to delve into every aspect of his quarterbacks’ game is going to help Tennessee’s offense. The decision not to have a quarterbacks coach during the Dobbs era is puzzling, to say the least. Failing to have a full-time, full-paid quarterbacks coach didn’t do the Vols any favors on the recruiting trail, either.
Though Jones’ pre-existing relationship with the Guarantano family helped the Vols land that elite prospect, Tennessee missed on some guys, who have referenced the Vols’ lack of a position coach as a factor.
Had Canales been entrenched during the entire recruitments of the 2018 class’s “Big Three” — Trevor Lawrence, Emory Jones and Justin Fields, all of which had the Vols high on their lists at one point early on — they may have landed one.
As it turns out, a quarterbacks class of two high-upside prospects like Martinez and Mike Penix may wind up being the best thing for UT, anyway. The Vols need options, especially after Sheriron Jones just transferred and nobody knows how true freshman Will McBride will turn out. If you alienate Dormady or Guarantano in the race to be UT’s starter, all of a sudden, the Vols’ QB situation is dire. Martinez and Penix aren’t just two warm bodies, either. They’re potentially very good quarterbacks wanted by a lot of really good teams.
It was a necessity for the Vols to get two signal-callers in this class, and Canales accomplished that, playing a massive role in the decisions of both kids.
The duo of committed quarterbacks visited Knoxville on the same weekend for the Orange & White Game, and Penix committed while on the visit. Martinez may have initially been taken aback, but Canales was always up front about Tennessee wanting two quarterbacks, and Martinez was always hotly recruited once the Vols got on him.
The one-time California quarterback decommitted from the Bears after his UT visit. Offers from Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma and others couldn’t sway Martinez, who wanted to be a Vol. He kept coming back to his visit and the relationship he’d struck up with Canales and others. When the Vols’ QBs coach traveled to California to seal the deal with Martinez a couple of weeks ago, nobody knows what was said. But it sold him.
Things like that make a quarterbacks coach invaluable. You want a guy who kids gravitate toward, who prospects want to play for, and Chico proved in the past three short weeks he can do that.
Now, if you glance at those message boards, you’d find nary a negative word about Canales. In this knee-jerk world of wanting megastar names in bold-font that make the prospects all over the country drool, recruiting still comes down to good, old-fashioned relationships.
It seems Canales has the ability to build those.
So, Canales can’t prove he was a fantastic hire without any game experience, of course, but he’s already proving to be an asset on the recruiting trail, standing out on a staff that is making Tennessee a hot name among top prospects once again.
Martinez’s commitment proves the Vols may not have gotten the biggest-name assistant out there when Jones hired Canales, but it’s one that, when coupled with the man himself, is resonating with prospects, anyway.
