Rod Smith was one of the best all-around players I played with in the NFL -- and I only got play with him when he was too old and too slow (laughing). He was the undisputed leader of the team, which took a lot of pressure off of me. The standard Rod set was high and he led by example. The game will miss a player like Rod Smith."

"Probably one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen him do was, in my first year there, I had just gotten hurt and we didn’t have a back up for a couple of days. So they had him take 7-on-7. I think he was 6-for-6. And it wasn’t like he was dumping to the back or hitting the checkdown. He was throwing a skinny route, dead on. He’d throw a go-route, he threw an out-route. I was thinking, ‘Good God, he’d be good enough to take my job if he spent a year working on it.’ It was sick."

"Why I felt so good around him is physically he didn’t look like anything. He’d walk kind of sideways. He sometimes had this high-type voice. I mean he didn’t look like a professional receiver when you put him next to Terrell Owens. But the things he didn’t do well he worked on. It’s hard to pick between them but Rod and Larry Centers had the two best sets of hands I’ve ever seen.’’
-- Former Broncos QB Jake Plummer on the retirement of Rod Smith