CHARLOTTE — His face flushed with emotion, his eyes welling with tears, Dave Canales grows quiet and lets the silence linger.
It’s a Sunday morning in mid-August, a half-hour before the Panthers’ eighth practice of training camp. Canales is sitting on a leather couch inside a suite at Bank of America Stadium, steps from the field he’ll coach on this fall. He’s 43 but looks 33, trim, tan, awash in energy and ambition.
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Eighteen months ago he was a little-known Seahawks position coach, the guy who spent a decade begging his boss for a promotion.