NC State adds former NFL assistant Matthew Symmes, Taylor McDaniel to football staff
As NC State’s spring practice slate is set to begin next week, the Wolfpack’s coaching staff continues to receive additions. Coach Dave Doeren hired two new staff members, continuing to fill spots on his staff for the 2025 season.
Doeren added former NFL assistant Matthew Symmes as the Wolfpack’s quality control coordinator, while he brought in Taylor McDaniel to take over as the program’s director of on-campus recruiting.
Symmes was most recently an analyst at Northwestern and was the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Valparaiso, a non-scholarship FCS program in Indiana, in 2023.
Before he arrived at Valpo, Symmes spent two seasons as a defensive analyst and assistant linebackers coach at East Carolina. He helped ECU to the 2021 Military Bowl and the 2022 Birmingham Bowl during his time in Greenville.
While Symmes has worked on both sides of the ball recently, he brings an extensive quarterback background to Raleigh.
In 2018, he was hired as an offensive assistant with the Pittsburgh Steelers, focused primarily on quarterbacks. Symmes stayed in that role through the 2020 season until Matt Canada was hired as the Steelers’ offensive coordinator.
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Symmes’ connection to NC State was his relationship with current Wolfpack offensive coordinator Kurt Roper. The assistant worked closely with Roper and the Blue Devils’ quarterbacks as an undergraduate intern at Duke during the 2012 and 2013 seasons. He later reunited with Roper at Florida and South Carolina, where Symmes served as a graduate assistant with the signal-callers at both programs.
“Matt is the most cutting-edge coach I have been around in my career,” Roper told ValpoAthletics.com of Symmes when he was hired. “He will bring an exciting, wide open offense that will be fun to watch each week.”
McDaniel, meanwhile, takes over as the team’s director of on-campus recruiting, which was a vacant position on staff after Cole Cook’s departure. She was at South Florida last season and previously served as Nebraska’s Director of Recruiting in 2022.
Symmes and McDaniel are the Pack’s latest additions to the staff. They join Zac Roper (special teams quality control), Nick Treco (defensive graduate assistant, DB) and Jarrod Hewitt (defensive graduate assistant, DL) as the most recent newcomers to the program ahead of the 2025 season.
