Upon arrival at The U, he broke his ankle early in his freshman season and was forced to sit and watch. His ascension through the college ranks went along with the success of the Hurricanes, who were like a machine at putting players into the NFL. It wasn’t a matter of “if” you were going to get drafted, it was more of a battle to see what round you’d be taken.
“I used to start every August by scouting Miami first,” said longtime Ravens director of college scouting and former Cleveland Browns general manager Phil Savage, who was directly involved in drafting Reed in Baltimore in April 2002. “You would get layout of positions and players and know what the best talent in the country looked like because it was a field of blue chip guys. And every year I’d go and see this No. 20 and he’s always around the ball. And he’s small. But you’d notice that kid makes more interceptions than anybody. And by the third year of seeing him you’re looking for him and it was like he was involved in every play.”
His secondary coach at Miami was a young Chuck Pagano, who remembers how excited he was to land Reed during his third year.
“Jimmy Johnson said back in 1986 that if they make plays in high school, they’ll make them in college,” Pagano said. “If you looked at his high school tape, there was nothing he didn’t do. He played every position on the field in Louisiana. Play after play, you’d want the ball in his hands, and he’s a threat to score from anywhere on the field.”
Pagano said he learned early on about Reed’s work ethic. “He watched a ton of tape – more than anyone I’d see at college. You have to learn how to study, but he had such a great work ethic. He’s driven. He hates to lose. He’s passionate, and he’s a great student of the game. It’s not an accident or luck that he’s been so successful and had such a long career.”
Pagano left when Butch Davis took the Cleveland Browns head coach job in 2001 and Reed elected to play his senior year for new coach Larry Coker, who had been the offensive coordinator at Miami during Davis’ reign. The Hurricanes won the National Championship that year. And amidst a sea of controversy and their tough-guy image at The U, Reed was crystal clean as a character person. “We had zero concerns about Ed for character, but we listed him as a bit small for safety, but he played bigger than his body,” Savage said. When NFL scouts asked Coker about Reed, he called him the best player he’d ever coached.”
“We had good grades on him, but they weren’t off the charts,” Savage said of the Baltimore Ravens draft board in 2002. “I remember taking a jog with Eric DeCosta one night and I told him I needed to go back and watch two more games to bump Reed’s grade up.”
8
By midday on April 21, 2002 the draft board had emptied the top picks from David Carr and Julius Peppers down into the 20’s, where the Ravens were holding the 24th pick. New England chose tight end Daniel Graham, and the New York Jets chose defensive end Bryan Thomas with No. 21 and 22.
Despite a yearlong search that began the previous May with 500 prospects and enough paperwork, research, and reports to fill several file cabinets, the Ravens’ final list of draft desirable players is made into a simple few sheets of paper with just ranking, name, and position. This is the result of “The Process” of Ozzie Newsome. Every time a name would come off the board and a prospect would be headed elsewhere on his NFL journey, Newsome would simply cross the name off. In what was dubbed the “Cap Purge” year of 2002, this was a draft where the Ravens were ready to take the best player available and strangely enough, the Top 22 names on the Ravens’ list were gone and the next two names were: linebacker Napoleon Harris (Northwestern) and safety Ed Reed (Miami). The first 22 teams in the NFL saw the players exactly the way the Ravens did, which is uncanny.
The Oakland Raiders were on the clock. Harris was 23rd on the Ravens’ list and Reed was 24th. The Raiders took Harris.
“Our board was picked clean, and he was the next best player,” Savage said. “He wasn’t six feet tall. He wasn’t 200 pounds. He didn’t run a 4.5. But he was a helluva football player.
“We told Art Modell, David [Modell] all of them, ‘When he gets here, he’s not going to look like [Peter] Boulware, [Chris] McAlister, or [Jon] Ogden, but we knew we were getting an instinctive, versatile football player. He showed up for the press conference wearing those baggy shorts, hair everywhere, and he wasn’t in a suit. Some folks in the building saw him and said, ‘This is the first round pick?’ ”
If anything, Reed resembled the Ravens’ first round draft pick four years earlier in 1998 when Newsome chose Duane Starks, another diminutive defensive back from Miami who played larger than his frame, with the 10th overall pick. And, counting Ray Lewis, this was the third time in seven drafts that Newsome used a first round pick on a Hurricanes defensive player.
Reed knew his association with Miami would help him in the NFL. He’d later come back to Coral Gables and preach what he learned at The U.
8“The strength of the pack is the wolf. The strength of the wolf is the pack,” Reed told the 2010 Hurricanes in a speech at his alma mater. “I couldn’t do anything without my teammates. You go to Miami. Nobody likes you. I’m telling you. I know. They don’t like me because I’m from the U. Everybody wants to be like us. You got to hit ’em with discipline, focus, determination, work ethic, heart. There’s a certain aura about us that people want to be part of. Every guy on my team in my senior year played in the NFL because we were all together. A true leader takes everyone else with him. My senior speech to the team was 45 minutes long. All I talked about was getting two more years. I loved this school. I loved everything about it.”
“But everybody you play against — they’re always playing their national championship against The U. It’s the little things. That’s what made us great. We hung together. We did it together. You gotta do it together.”
And everything Ed Reed would do in his career as a member of the Baltimore Ravens would come with Ray Lewis, another wolf in the pack of ‘Canes. Ray was also accustomed to being the alpha leader and already established his den in Baltimore.
Ray Lewis was only 40 months older than Reed but had already played six full seasons in the NFL. He was the best player in the league in the prime of his career. And many were calling Lewis the greatest linebacker of all time and some called him the greatest player of his generation.
Lewis already had a pelt by the time Reed arrived, and he would forever be the “little brother.” It’s well documented that for several years, he was tagged with the nickname “Little Ray.” Most people around Reed would tell you that he was less than thrilled or comfortable with that pre-destined role as the next guy from Miami.
