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With the No. 1 leadership role on the team built into his position, how does Harris intend to go about that?

“Just care about my guys. Show them that I care. And I think it’s important to not just do that as football players but with who they are. I’m just going to love them. I’m going to lean on them every day and let them know that we’re all in this together and to show that I care.”

Sunderland wants to make it completely clear that he wasn’t just shuffling the deck or simply making change for the sake of change.

“Chemistry is important every year, but I think it is ultra-important this year. We brought back some key glue guys and there was method to the madness.

“And a lot of the players we targeted in free agency have some familiarity with each other. We know they’re good people and we know they’re good leaders so we’re depending on leadership through and through.”

Head coach Jason Maas, who also has three new co-ordinators to go with all the player change, has spent the last three months preparing to tackle the challenge of enrolling all the newcomers in EE Chemistry 101.

“Every day that we’re here we’re going to be impressing the idea of how important chemistry and becoming a team is to winning,” said Maas. “That’s more of what we’re looking at. We know the talent is here but there’s a glue we have to manufacture.

“You talk about it and you do different things to foster that. We have tons of team building exercises planned throughout training camp that we’ve thought of from things we’re doing in meetings to some events we’re planning with things built in for them to do together.