My favorite player hit in college football right about the same time my career as a reporter was starting to pick up speed. I had graduated from the University of Miami, so I was very familiar with the Hurricanes’ history. Ed Reed was from Destrehan High in Louisiana and picked UM when the program was still trying to get off the mat and dust itself off from hefty NCAA sanctions.
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Because Ed picked Miami over Tulane and didn’t get much interest from Texas or the powers of the SEC or Big 12, he has referred to himself “as a two-star recruit,” even though technically he came up before the online recruiting star system was a thing.
That’s O.K., we get it, Ed.
He didn’t have great size coming out of high school. He was around 5-10, 5-11. He probably ran a 4.6 40, but credit to Miami receivers coach Curtis Johnson, a guy who knew about Ed through his deep ties to his native Louisiana. Johnson knew Reed was a special athlete with uncanny leadership skills and vision like no other. Reed wasn’t just a playmaker in football, he averaged 20 points a game in basketball, was a big-time baseball player and starred on the track team as a javelin thrower, sprinter and long jumper.
Butch Davis, the ’Canes’ head coach at the time, learned about recruiting from his time under Jimmy Johnson, including why it was critical to see how football prospects handle themselves in other sports. When he saw Reed play basketball, he was sold. Miami may have had a shortage of scholarships at the time, but they were making sure they used one on Reed even though the coaching staff kept asking themselves, “Why aren’t more people on this guy?”
Reed’s rise at UM, not so coincidentally, paralleled the ’Canes’ rise back up to the top of the college football world. That era of the ’Canes had many other great workers and talents — Dan Morgan, Damione Lewis, Edgerrin James, Reggie Wayne and Ken Dorsey to name a few — but Ed just seemed to have a glow about him. The ’Canes feel like they invented “swag” in the football world. Ed was dripping in it.
If you were around the ’Canes program back then, you felt him. You couldn’t not feel him. In that regard, he was different from any player I’ve ever covered in college football. Reed had, and still has, a charisma that I haven’t quite seen from any college player. There was a cool to it. He got the nickname “Papa Smurf” from his teammates at UM.
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He was the biggest star of the 2001 ’Canes, the best team the sport has ever seen. He was the tone-setter. The summer before that season, when players would show up for their “voluntary” 6 a.m. workouts, they would discover that Ed had already been there for an hour grinding, drenched in sweat.
Message sent. His teammates figured it out, and then they began showing up at 5 a.m. too.
Later that year, Miami was facing arch-rival Florida State in Tallahassee. The ’Noles were No. 13 in the country. UM had seen its 21-0 lead fade to a 21-13 margin at halftime. Then Ed delivered the most famous speech in UM history. He had separated his shoulder in the first half. He took a painkiller in the locker room, stood up and, through tearing eyes, lit into his teammates.
“Stop asking me if I’m hurt. I’m hurt, dawg. Of course I’m hurt. But I’m playin’. ‘Cause we said we’re gonna dominate, and we ain’t dominatin.’ ”
Mention these three words to an older ’Canes fan — I’m hurt, dawg — and they’ll probably get goose bumps.
Reed later picked off a pass and the ’Canes dominated, 49-27. They ended up running through the rest of college football that season. Beat No. 15 Syracuse 59-0. They beat No. 11 Washington 65-7 the next week. They played Nebraska in the Rose Bowl for the national title.
“We were in the locker room before we played Nebraska for the national title in 2001, and Coach Coker was scared,” Curtis Johnson later told me. “He was, like, ‘I was at Oklahoma State, and Nebraska used to put 60 on us.’ Well, Ed was standing close by. He turns around and goes ‘Nebraska? Nebraska?!? We Miami! Coach, don’t be scared. We got this.’ He patted him on the shoulder and walked off.” Miami jumped out to a 34-0 lead and capped off a magical season.
The Baltimore Ravens drafted Reed 24th overall in 2002, and he ended up as a first-ballot Hall of Fame. In his career he intercepted 64 passes and returned them for 1,590 yards and seven touchdowns, but more than that, he proved to be a quarterback’s worst nightmare, always playing head games with them.
A few years back my Fox TV crew did a Wisconsin game, and we were visiting with Badgers defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard, a great player in his own right. We got to talking about him playing behind Ed in the NFL, and he began to tell stories about the matrix kind of stuff Reed did on the field, baiting people and playing guessing games, and Ed’s genius. Leonhard said the Ravens’ coaches talked about how players could study Ed, but it probably wasn’t wise to attempt some of the stuff he did out there. He just saw the game differently. Leonhard spent a decade in the NFL and played for six different organizations and calls Reed, by far, the smartest player he’s ever been around.
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“Studying the game is no different than a computer booting up a system,” Reed told me. “Football is that simple. A lot of people mess it up and don’t make the plays because they complicate the game. For me, it’s tunnel vision.”
Obviously, easier said than done.
A few years into his NFL career, I did a profile on Reed for ESPN The Magazine. Before I started writing, our photo editor Nik asked me how I’d describe Ed. I used the term “old soul.” Nik ran with that idea and scheduled a photo shoot at an assisted living center for seniors in Miami Beach. I spent that morning with Ed as he went through as grueling a workout as I’d ever seen. He finished it by spending what seemed like a half-hour just catching footballs coming out of a pitching machine from every possible angle, left-handed, right-handed, from this side, from that side, from distance, right up to walking every step to directly in front of the machine. Then we drove to the Miami Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged.
At first all of the seniors around the pool were hesitant about who we were and what Ed was going there. None of them had any idea who he was. But he started engaging them. That wasn’t something the photographer was expecting. Before long, he was getting dating tips, hearing some bad jokes and learning Yiddish. It was very sweet. One 89-year-old woman said she had never seen a football game but was going to start watching because “Mr. Reeves is such a mensch.”
Usually, those magazine photo shoots would last an hour or two depending on the athlete’s level of patience. Reed was there all afternoon.
By 5 p.m., Ed had them eating out of his hands. Literally. He was feeding them cookies and they were giving him neck massages, joking that he was their new grandson.
Before the seniors all went back inside, he posed for a picture with each resident. He autographed the photo and then printed his name out under his signature in case they didn’t remember who he was.
That guy was one of a kind.
(Top photo: Scott Halleran / AllSport)
