Current and former players were picking up the Dan Morgan-Dave Canales vibe on Thursday

“It’s interesting, when Foxy came in, we had meetings with him, one-on-ones,” Muhammad recalled. “He sat down with every single player, and one of the things I remember from that meeting with Foxy, he said, you know, you’ve got blue chip players, and then you got blue chip play, right? And the ability to maximize everyone’s potential will allow you to take a blue chip player and get blue chip play out of him.

“So I think that that run that we went on, it wasn’t so much about an overhaul, we need to scrap the whole thing and everything is wrong. There were tweaks. And after 1-15 you go 7-9 and almost make the playoffs.

“But, Super Bowl the next year, so the biggest changes were that came from within. We had the components of success, but we weren’t playing at the level we needed to play, and that’s going to be the job here. So how, how do you identify those key contributors and get them to play better than they played before?”

Rucker also remembered Fox’s “smart and tough” mantra and said you could see the difference in a team that won a single game the year before almost instantly.

“To be honest with you, I saw it really quick,” Rucker said of the pivot from 2001 to 2003. “I just remember vividly, and this is one thing that will stay with me for the rest of my life. Coach Fox said I want smart, and I want tough. It’s real simple, right? We don’t need to make things complicated. Smart, you know, make smart plays, right? Am I doing a bonehead thing that is costing our team a penalty? Am I not securing the ball? Those things are smart and they’re tough.

“You can’t teach toughness, right? Either I’m going to be physical, or I’m not. And it’s real simple. And so that’s something that was part of my DNA that I bought into right away. I was like, I might not be the most athletic or the most talented, but I know I can be smart because I can control that, and I know I can be tough, and I can control that. And so if you start with those two things, now, the sky is the limit.”