NEW ORLEANS — The unusual January heat wasn’t the only thing that startled the Troy football team.

With the rest of campus set for an off day to celebrate MLK Day 11 months ago, the Trojans trudged to an early-morning appointment at the football complex.

Buses awaited to whisk them away on a field trip that had nothing to do with football.

The Trojans, whose public persona revolves around touchdowns, first downs and big plays, had a day to themselves to quietly learn about some notable history.

Coach Neal Brown issued a gag order to his staff and disavowed any publicity efforts, allowing his team to properly appreciate Rosa Parks and the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

“It made me feel blessed that I didn’t have to live through all that,” offensive lineman Steven Rowzee says 11 months later with Troy preparing to play North Texas in Saturday’s New Orleans Bowl.

“I appreciate everything all those people did.”

The Trojans, with players like Rowzee from as far away as Chicago and others like defensive lineman Hunter Reese from as near as Wetumpka, carefully went through the Rosa Parks Museum.

The museum is on Troy’s Montgomery campus.

Then they loaded up again and headed west to the Pettus Bridge, site of Bloody Sunday in 1965 when state troopers beat civil rights marchers.

The Trojans walked across it as a team.

“Seeing the video and actually going to the bridge makes you think, ‘That happened right there,’” Reese said. “You don’t get to see stuff like that all the time.”

The trip reinforced an offseason theme of the Trojans, Brown said, and has carried over into this season.

It helped mark the end of a 10-win 2016 and the start of the 2017 season, in which Troy has won a Sun Belt Conference championship and already matched last year’s win total.

But football success wasn’t the intention.

“We thought it would be a great educational opportunity,” Todd Watson said last week before he resigned as Troy’s director of football operations to take a similar job at Tennessee.

“We have guys from all over the country here,” Watson said. “Being this close, we thought it would be a great opportunity to go and learn a little history.”

Brown and Watson arranged for the trip to reinforce what the Trojans were learning from a book written by a former NFL coach.

Tony Dungy’s “Uncommon: Finding Your Path to Significance” trumpets having a positive impact on those around you and on society.

“To kind of kick off an ‘uncommon’ theme, who are some examples of uncommon?” Brown said.

The holiday honoring Rev. Martin Luther King was on the horizon. The Rosa Parks Museum and the Pettus Bridge beckoned.

“I don’t think very many of the players, including those from Alabama, had done those stops,” Brown said. “It was really good. It was really positive. We’re going to continue to do things like that.”

Reese, though he has worked at jobs in downtown Montgomery, had never been, he said. Rowzee never expected to visit.

“I remember my teachers talking about it a little in high school, but not as much as we learned that day,” Rowzee said.

“It showed us how to be uncommon. That’s what really lit the spark.”

The players, rather than dread the holiday trip, actually were looking forward to it, they said. During the day, Watson said he and the coaches noticed the players’ interest grew.

They listened intently to the presentation at the Rosa Parks Museum. When they walked the bridge, Watson said, “it was a moment of reflecting.”

Being “uncommon” resonated.

“That was our whole theme over the offseason,” Reese said.

“It still is.”