The Pittsburgh Steelers find that their 2017 season ended a bit prematurely, and are undergoing the exit meeting process a couple weeks sooner than they would have liked. Nevertheless, what must be done must be done, and we are now at the time of the year where we close the book on one season and look ahead to the next.
While we might not know all the details about what goes on between Head Coach Mike Tomlin and his players during these exit meetings, we do know how we would conduct those meetings if they were let up to us. So here are the Depot’s exit meetings for the Steelers’ roster following the 2016 season.
Player: Kameron Canaday
Position: Long Snapper
Experience: 1 Year
The last of the starters is the most important one of all, and not even the one that we expected to be doing a little less than a year ago. When the Steelers used a sixth-round pick last year on long snapper Colin Holba, I joked that his acquisition would change the balance of power in the AFC.
Unfortunately I was right, because he lost out to Kameron Canaday, later signed with the Jacksonville Jaguars, and the Jaguars then beat the Steelers in the playoffs, so…I guess I get credit for that?
But Canaday did his job, for the most part, during his first season. Originally an undrafted free agent for the Arizona Cardinals, he won their long snapper job as a rookie in 2016, but lost it after three games and a couple of suspect snaps.
He was pretty clean through most of the 2017 season for the Steelers, but he did draw one delay of game penalty, the yardage that was tacked off resulting in the team electing to punt rather than continue on with their planned field goal attempt. He also was flagged for a hold on another punt.
Frankly, there isn’t much professional work done tracking the successes or failures of NFL long snappers. There is more interest paid to the college long snappers as they head into the draft.
He didn’t record a tackle during the season, officially, though I credited him with one back in week one. I thought that his consistency with his snapping improved over the course of the season as well, and I know that he was able to help induce at least one fair catch, though he missed a tackle or two.
What attracted the Steelers to Canaday is that he is a big body for the position, as was Holba, and Greg Warren before him, for well over a decade. 21 of the 32 primary long snappers last season were shorter than him, some substantially, while about half also weighed less—again, some substantially. And this is in comparison to the rostered long snappers, not even the ones that don’t make it.
