The thing that struck me the most, listening to Cooley and Warren talk about Simmons in separate conversations, was just how similar their descriptions of Simmons were, despite the twenty years that separated their experiences being coached by him.

Here's Cooley, on what made Simmons such a helpful instructor. "He could teach, he could criticize, he could compliment, and that's what's great about him. He could say whatever he wanted, and it would never come out as upsetting. And he adapted to what the room needed, or to what I needed, or to what Todd [Yoder] needed. He fit the atmosphere of the tight ends room."

And here's Warren, along similar lines. "Rennie, I think, was a very fair coach, in that he would come to you -- this is just the way he treated me -- he would always come to me after a game and he would say, 'Hey, you know you didn't play up to par,' and on the other hand he would come up to you and say, 'Hey, you had one of your best games this year.' If a coach says, 'Well you know what, you played hard', and you hear that all the time, pretty soon mediocrity is going to creep in and you as a tight end are not going to be the player you want to be."

This, Warren continued, is more important than you might think. "Now, part being a coach is that you have to know, there are some guys you can lay the hammer on and there are other guys you probably need to stay off of or they'll tank, so to speak."

Warren also echoed Cooley's point about Simmons knowing how to draw the line between accessible coach and guy you hang out with. "I heard him say once, and this kind of stuck to me, that as a coach in the professional ranks, you don't want to get too close to the guys that you're coaching because at any point in time you might have to let them go. I think we just had a great working relationship when I was playing and I wouldn't consider him, at the time that I was playing, a great, great friend of mine. Now I think he's a good friend of mind, after the fact, after the time that I played, but when he was coaching me, he was strictly business."

One more example. Here's Warren on Rennie Simmons as disciplinarian: "You hear a lot of things from other tight ends around the NFL, that their coach was just a disciplinarian, that he didn't let you get away with anything, always laid the hammer down. Rennie wasn't really like that."

And here's Cooley on the same subject. "Rennie is someone we would goof around with a little bit. We would always joke about who could get him to smile. Yoder had the most success. I think I was too sarcastic."

The two also agree on just how well prepared Simmons had them for every game. Almost. "In the years that I played with him," Warren says, "there was nothing -- other than maybe one game, a Chicago game with Buddy Ryan and the Bears defense -- but every game we knew exactly where they were going to be, who was going to be blitzing, because we were all prepared. He's very professional, he's a very hard worker, and that is the way he attacks the game."

And Cooley sums it all up. "He has this great knowledge of the game – he's been around football his whole life. He just loves it, loves being around football and being around the guys. I really like him and I respect him a ton."