What exactly did Bethune-Cookman University think it was getting in Ed Reed? When you hire a lion and expect it to act like a lamb, that’s on you.
The school on the east coast of Central Florida did what you do now if you are an HBCU (historically Black colleges and universities) football program: You look for the next Coach Prime.
You see what Deion Sanders did for Jackson State University in the same Southwestern Athletic Conference — bringing electricity and national attention, winning, scoring recruiting and portal prizes, getting on a TV commercial with Nick Saban — and you want some of that. Yes, please.
Reed, like Sanders, is Black, young-ish and a former star player whose raw personality would sing in urban living rooms. Light on coaching experience? So was Deion, and he hit so big that he used his HBCU stepping-stone like a pole vault and is now the head coach of the FBS-level Colorado Buffaloes in the Pac-12 — and just pick-pocketed five-star recruit Cormani McClain from Mario Cristobal and the Miami Hurricanes, as a matter of fact.
Bethune-Cookman wanted all of that, and needed a change, coming off consecutive 2-9 seasons — and the school was not wrong to take a shot on Reed.
Instead the school was wrong to go soft, and get scared, and bail on Reed before it ever gave him any kind of fair chance. The embarrassment on this mess is on the university like a stain.
What, they ran scared from Reed because he cursed at his players? Because his honesty including criticizing the facilities was blunt and rough-edged?
That directness that might have chafed feelings inside a college president’s office would be heard and play much differently inside high school locker rooms. It would have been heard as real.
Reed is, at 44, no different than he was as a future College Football Hall of Fame safety with the Miami Hurricanes or a future Pro Football Hall of Famer with the Baltimore Ravens — a tornado getting out of nobody’s way. As a player the boisterous bluster was enveloped by crowd noise and mostly just heard as aggressiveness.
Evidently it does not sit as well when that very same “Ed’s-gonna-say-what-Ed’s-gonna-say” attitude is volunteered on an Instagram video that leaves his new bosses scrambling over the idea the lion they just hired was roaring loud and hurting their ears.
Bethune-Cookman had “entered into an agreement” with Reed 25 days ago and got cold feet fast, backing out. If the school did not fire him per se, the result was the same.
The school later said Reed had withdrawn his name from consideration for the job.
He put out a 15-minute video on his Instagram Sunday to say that was a lie, that he was not withdrawing.
(The first person who commented and liked the video was Deion Sanders. The second was Lawrence Taylor.)
Reed wore a black sweatshirt in the video with a single word on it: BOSS. He held a football. The meeting room on campus was filled with his players and parents. His unscripted talk was full of anger and sharp gestures. His players have sent the administration a petition demanding he be rehired.
(If he isn’t, the offer of a job on Sanders’ Colorado staff would not surprise. And if that doesn’t happen, UM should welcome him back in some role.)
“My vision for change is probably moving too fast for a lot of people,” Reed said in his parting-shot video. “They do not want me here because I tell the truth. There are evil, corrupt people that don’t care about your kids. This hurts because I know people don’t care about the kids the way I do.”
After his NFL career ended in 2013, Reed’s only previous coaching experience was as a Buffalo Bills assistant defensive backs coach in 2016, the job not surviving a coaching change.
He was back at UM as the Canes’ football “chief of staff” in 2020-21 and “senior football adviser “ in 2022. Those jobs were ceremonial as the titles suggest. His biggest real value might be in his name helping Miami score a five-star recruit perhaps.
He was aching to coach. Bethune-Cookman gave him the chance, then snatched it away.
Nobody wins here.
The university looks incompetently like it didn’t quite know what it wanted or didn’t do enough vetting to know what it might be getting, damnable either way.
Reed looks like Reed: Somebody who won’t be quiet for anybody, is unfiltered and not smooth around the nuances of public relations. This speaks well of his honesty and character — but not so much of his future in a profession where the head coach must answer to athletic directors and school presidents.
Sanders hopped briefly into that Instagram video of Reed’s.
“I know how you hurt,” he said. “I know how you feel about those kids.”
Bethune-Cookman thought it had the next Coach Prime in Ed Reed.
And it might have, too, until it got too scared to find out.
