It’s normal when you’re young to wistfully consider the possibilities ahead and what paths your career could dart down. Ed Reed did that one day long ago.
He was still a student-athlete at the University of Miami. Of course, Reed wasn’t your standard student or your standard athlete. He was named an All-American during his final two collegiate seasons, the last of which ended with a national championship (2001).
He recorded 21 interceptions over four seasons in Miami and was cruising toward becoming a first-round pick. But as passionate as Reed was on the field, he already found himself looking ahead to a role that suited his high level of football intelligence and natural leadership abilities.
So he had a question for Randy Shannon, the Hurricanes defensive coordinator at the time. A question that doubled as a job-feeler.
“Ed and I were talking, and he said, ‘One day I want to come back and coach,’” Shannon told Bleacher Report. “‘When I’m done playing in the NFL, I want to come back and coach. Would you hire me?’”
Even then Shannon didn’t need much time to let the question roll around in his mind or talk it over.
“Yeah, I’d hire you,” was the response that came without hesitation.
Shannon didn’t get to him before Rex Ryan, the Buffalo Bills head coach who hired Reed in January to be his new assistant defensive backs coach.
Reed wasn’t just daydreaming or making idle conversation with Shannon on that day 15 years ago. Even if he didn’t know it then, the Louisiana native was always preparing for coaching after his playing days ended.
The brilliance you watched from Reed every week throughout a nine-time Pro Bowl career wasn’t purely the product of physical gifts. Far more often, it was the result of intense tape study to further expand his advanced football mind. Even early on with the Hurricanes, he was already eager to share that intelligence while becoming a teacher and that extra coach on the field.
“Sometimes I would give him the game plan of what we’re going to do on a Monday, before a Tuesday practice,” Shannon said. “He’d go over it with the rest of the defense so then when we came out in practice the Tuesday, it would run crisp.”
Reed’s inner coach was always there, and now he has a chance to bring that part of his football personality out while going from on-field legend to off-field mentor and teacher.
Ryan hired Reed less than a year after the Super Bowl XLVII champion officially ended his playing career. The connection made sense, as Ryan coached Reed twice. The first meeting came when Ryan was the Baltimore Ravens defensive coordinator. Then the two hooked up again when Reed wound down his career with the New York Jets, where Ryan was the head coach.
The path Reed has chosen—or rather, the one he had in mind many years ago—is a common one for the recently retired player who isn’t done with football. Reed only needs to look at the Bills defensive backs coach he’s now assisting in Buffalo for a fine example. Tim McDonald played 13 NFL seasons and was a Pro Bowler in six of them.
What’s unique about Reed, however, is his status as a surefire Hall of Famer. It’s not a stretch to call him one of the best in NFL history to ever play his position—or even the best. And now just two seasons removed from his final snap—and three from winning the Super Bowl in Baltimore—Reed is already transitioning into a coaching role even before a replica of his face is in Canton.
That makes him a case study for how difficult that career move can be.
The NFL was only granted one Ed Reed and one safety who saw the field as he did. So how will he learn to speak with players who are over a decade younger and aren’t nearly on his level? How will he adapt to different learning styles? Can he take the deep knowledge hovering in his mind after 12 pro seasons and become an effective communicator without being in the trenches?
Answering those questions about what Reed will become requires first getting a deeper understanding of what he was. Let’s start in the film room, where player and coach will be intertwined.
Ed Reed the film mastermind
Reed sat down with Bills safety Aaron Williams for the first time earlier this offseason. Their meeting took place before OTAs and before Reed had set foot on a field for the first time as a coach.
He may have been speaking to Williams in his new coaching role for the first time, but the two had met in another setting where Reed does his finest work: the film room.
“He told me he watched some film on me, and there are definitely a lot of things I need to work on,” said Williams, who missed 13 games in 2015 due to a neck injury. “He said there were a lot of plays I made that could have been a pick-six, and there are certain techniques or certain reads that I’m not doing or seeing. He’s really helped me out so far in just the hour we’ve spent together.”
Reed needed only one hour to start making a difference with Williams, but the hours he invested into developing his football mind can’t possibly be counted.
As a coach now, his value goes beyond experience and the sheer talent from when he played, though both carry weight. His value lies in the amount of football he’s digested through rigorous study and his ability to apply that knowledge on Sundays.
“I can’t tell you how pumped I am about this year to even just be in the film room with him,” Williams said. “Forget practice. Just to be in the film room and pick at his intelligence is going to be phenomenal.”
You, the viewer at home, may have watched Reed make plays he had no business being in position for and assumed he was mostly relying on instinct or even freelancing at times. But it was learned instinct that Reed sharpened through relentless preparation.
On game day, you saw his physical talent. His teammates saw a week of work come to life.
“Man, all of them,” was cornerback Lardarius Webb’s answer when asked how many of Reed’s plays were the direct result of his film study.
Reed wasn’t just improvising. He relied on tape study and his football intellect to make informed, calculated risks that usually paid off.
But can he take how he sees the game and use that vision to teach his new football students? Or will he struggle to bridge the gap between what he sees and what others can’t see because they’re not Ed Reed?
“I’ve seen him pick off a slant on the opposite side of the field when he was playing as a Cover 2 safety and take it to the house,” Webb added, reminding us again that everyone else finds themselves playing and watching a different game. “He’d do things that seemed unorthodox, but he trusted what he studied. It’s as though he saw the offense do something 100 times in that situation already, and 95 percent of the time he was right.”
Trusting your eyes is one hurdle on the football field. Teaching others to do the same is entirely different. The view changes once you’re at the front of a classroom and not a student.
But Reed’s mind is so far ahead that it may not matter where he's sitting or standing.
Vance Joseph was the Houston Texans defensive backs coach during Reed’s time there in 2013. He spent an offseason and seven regular-season games in Houston after being signed as a free agent. That brief time was all Reed needed to make it clear he has the fundamental skills to decipher the game as a coach.
“He would see when a receiver was in a certain stance and if he would grab his gloves,” Joseph said. “It was often really small, minute things he would find that were huge on game day. He would look for the things no one else is looking for. He would have stats about if this guy is in the game for 10 plays, then seven of those have usually been runs. And if this other guy has been in the game for 10 plays, then it’s been six deep balls.”
Just like anything that happens on the field, watching film is a learned skill. Joseph said he saw the future coach in Reed when he was able to not just analyze film, but more importantly pluck out the critical elements.
“Ed had a great feel for what’s important when you’re watching film and not just what they’re doing offensively,” Joseph continued. “He noted who’s doing it, how they’re doing it and where they’re doing it. That’s coaching, because when you know all that information, you can make the proper calls and have the proper personnel in the game.”
The more you speak to former teammates and coaches about Reed’s mental mastery of the game and how he’ll take that into coaching now, the more it becomes clear he didn’t just have a high-end football mind.
It became a database, and at any moment, he could summon the necessary information.
“We ran a Cover 3 defense, and basically on third down, we’d be man-to-man,” said Cary Williams, the cornerback who played alongside Reed for four seasons in Baltimore. “And if they ran a route against man coverage that got them a significant gain just one or two times previously that season, Ed would go back as far as he needed to and turn on that film to find something we needed to remember later.”
Then Williams recalled a specific play Reed had talked about all week. This one from a Monday night game in 2012 (jump ahead to the 43-second mark):
“He was talking about that exact play after they ran it in a preseason game," Williams said. "And he picked it off and scored a touchdown.”
Reed’s film study went so deep, Williams said, that he would note which side of the field a quarterback looked at before starting his cadence.
Years earlier, former Ravens head coach Brian Billick experienced the power of Reed’s field-reading during his own practice. Billick ran the scout-team offense to both get a sense of the best game plan and to interact more with players lower on the depth chart.
“I’m looking at the cards, so I know what’s coming,” he said. “And to watch him communicate based on the formation and the down and distance—or whatever we were working on that day—you could tell right away he knew what was going on with the offense. It was like he was looking at my card and communicating that on the back end with his defensive teammates.”
Reed was already directing traffic then and being a quarterback in the secondary, but can he be an effective communicator and improve those around him?
It turns out he’s already done plenty of that.
Ed Reed the communicator and teacher
Reed was entering his age-31 season when the Ravens used their third-round pick in 2009 to select Webb. As a rookie, Webb started four games in the same secondary as Reed, and he remembers a key aspect of the veteran’s teaching style: clarity.
“He was a teacher to us in the locker room and a teacher to us on the field,” Webb said. “He wasn’t just telling us what we needed to do. He was telling us in such a way so we would understand and wouldn’t mess it up the next time.”
"He wouldn’t just say, ‘Hey, you had the flat there.’ He would explain why you had the flat," Webb continued. "He would put it in a way that now I knew every time that when the same play unfolded I had the flat. That’s why he was great, and a great communicator and a great motivator.”
Those two tools—communicator and motivator—are essential for Reed now, just as they were during much of his career when he was among the respected leaders on a dominant defense. He was one of the pillars for Ravens defenses that swarmed, then smothered. In that role, he raised the play of those around him.
Jim Leonhard is a shining example of Reed’s lasting impact. Leonhard retired in 2014 after 10 seasons as a journeyman safety. He pinballed around to five teams, including a stop in Baltimore for the 2008 season.
He stayed there for just one year, which was long enough for Leonhard to now call Reed the “most intelligent player I ever played with, hands down.”
“I think he’s really going to have a huge impact,” Leonhard said of Reed’s coaching and communicating potential. “Especially with young players, and teaching them how to read an offense both pre-snap and throughout the course of a game. Taking that from him helped me so much in my career, and now he’ll help so many young players who may not understand the value of it or haven’t put the time and effort into that aspect of their game.”
There are many connections between Reed’s time as a player and his new gig as a coach. But a defining difference is that now he feels responsible for more than just the on-field performance of his defense and his teammates.
In his new position, he wants to influence something deeper that extends further than the boundaries of a stadium.
“I always thought about just cultivating the sport as much as possible, helping out as much as possible and giving back to the youth as much as possible,” Reed said during his press conference at the end of Bills minicamp, per the Buffalo News. “Me being a coach, you see how guys need to learn how to be professionals, need to be taught professionalism and how to protect themselves as an organization.”
That’s the cherry on top of the Reed package Buffalo has signed up for now.
Sure, he can help players master the nuances of film study and learn to develop instincts through preparation. He can point out subtle clues that lie within different formations or remind his position group of basic, but vitally important, techniques that help to decode a play.
That’s his football job and his main job, but you can’t place a value on the added intangibles Reed brings. He’s fresh off his playing career, which will allow him to identify with what players are going through while turning young prospects into professionals.
In fact, Reed has such a stocked coaching toolbox to draw from that Ryan doesn’t think he’ll be able to hold on to him for long. Ryan told John Murphy, the voice of the Bills, this in an interview:
Even late in his career, when he wasn't the player he once was—he was coming from the very top of the mountain, but he was still an effective player—it was the other things that he did in leading players. That's where I was like, the sky's the limit for him. Within five or six years, he may very well be a head coach in this league.
Maybe Reed will be a coaching phenom, just as he was as a safety when the ball-hawking flash in the secondary recorded five interceptions during his rookie season. Then he was selected to his first Pro Bowl only one year later.
Maybe he will rise fast, immediately adapting to the delicate craft of teaching, but repeating that quick ascension now as a coach will mean absorbing information rapidly to bridge the wide learning gap between Reed and his fellow headset-wearers.
That might be his most difficult challenge yet.
Ed Reed the coach
Vance Joseph is the perfect example of the typical coaching-ladder climb and how much catch-up Reed has ahead of him. Joseph’s playing career was a two-season cup of coffee, and then at the age of 26, he started his next football career in a common entry-level coaching role: graduate assistant.
That was his title at the University of Colorado in 1999, and he bounced around the college ranks until landing as the San Francisco 49ers assistant defensive backs coach in 2005. Now at the age of 43, he’s a defensive coordinator after being hired by the Miami Dolphins in January. That’s one rung away from head coach, and it took him 17 years to get there.
Reed is behind in that sense, but he’s ahead in so many others. Few have his mind that’s still fresh from days of dominance on the field. And perhaps more importantly in this new career, few first-time coaches at any level are surrounded by the wealth of experience Reed is among now.
“Most players when they’re done playing, even the very bright ones, have no clue,” Joseph said. “My first four or five years coaching, I had no clue. It’s going to be a learning curve for him. But he’s with a bunch of great examples.”
Those examples include both Ryan brothers, who have 58 years of coaching experience between them. Then there’s Bills defensive coordinator Dennis Thurman, who started his coaching career back in 1988. He’s been a defensive backs coach for four different organizations and is now in his second defensive coordinator role. Thurman is also familiar with Reed after spending time as his position coach in Baltimore and then his coordinator with the Jets.
Everything is aligned to make the Bills a soft, ideal landing spot for Reed’s transition. It gives him a foundation and a sort of football support group to fall back on.
Internally, the mental challenge of being responsible for players who aren’t on your level will be his first major obstacle—and one that may take time to overcome. In the early going, he has a coping mechanism: hitting golf balls.
“The hard thing I’ve found with players of Ed’s caliber—a Hall of Fame caliber—is that sometimes it’s hard for them to transition into coaching,” Billick said. “The players you’re working with aren’t as intuitive or aren’t as smart or instinctive about the game as you are, and you become frustrated. Or maybe they don’t work as hard as you did, and they’re not as committed to the film work. There are a lot of opportunities to get frustrated.”
Finding value in breakthrough teaching moments when you reach a player could be the best way to counteract any lingering day-to-day frustration. Reed may have plenty of those early on because, as it turns out, he wasn’t just a leader during his playing career and an on-field coach.
No, there were times when he became an actual coach, complete with his own customized drills.
“He had fundamentals and knew specific drills to get specific results you wanted on the field,” Cary Williams said. “He was always creative with his drills. It just always made sense because they got you better and made you feel like a better player. Then you’d see your game elevate to another level.”
Ed Reed the coach has already produced positive results, albeit in a different environment than when he was still fully immersed and part of the on-field product. Prior to Buffalo, his only true coaching experience was running a football camp at his old high school for the past 15 years.
Now those two different mindsets—legendary player and novice coach—are set to mesh in one individual who has the potential to recognize an equally advanced football mind and nurture it.
“The question becomes whether or not Ed can recognize the same instincts he had in a player,” Billick said. “And can he then trust those instincts and let them go? Or does he have to reel them in more if players think they know but really don’t and they’re not following up with the film work?
“That will be the challenge, and who is there better to recognize if a guy has something special than Ed," Billick said. "He’s lived it, and he’ll see it.”