Ed Reed can help HBCUs — if he doesn’t act like a savior

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This week, while NFL Hall of Famer Ed Reed was playing janitor around the Bethune-Cookman University campus — and then telling everybody about it on social media — he probably didn’t realize that Oliver “Buddy” Pough, the coach at South Carolina State, had to paint the hash marks on his own practice field. Pough remembers a time when someone on the grounds crew made those little dashes look crooked. He couldn’t coach like that, so Pough found the white paint and fixed the darned things himself.

And while Reed was throwing all historically Black colleges and universities under his golf cart, complaining about a “broken mentality,” surely he hadn’t heard how Mervyl Melendez would make his Bethune-Cookman baseball players wear polo shirts and khaki pants on road trips. Even when the team dined at casual establishments such as Chili’s, Melendez would emphasize table etiquette, the proper way to hold a fork. Then, because Melendez has his own mentality on how things should be done the “right way,” he would have his players bus their own tables.

Reed has been a head football coach at an HBCU for less than a full pay period, and he’s already frustrated. He has picked up garbage and claims to have cleaned out his own office because no one did so before he arrived. And he guarded those secrets, in defense of his new home, for as long as he apparently could. Less than two weeks. Then on Sunday, he felt compelled to air out all the dirty laundry. And especially the “trash!”

Listen to Reed spit out that word during his profanity-filled Instagram Live stream. He’s disgusted by it. Though he’s livid, there’s a sense of sadness over this failure. His disappointment over the reality of Bethune-Cookman’s facilities oozes out of his f-bombs. So when Reed streamed his indignation over Instagram — his platform as a once-famous football man assured he would reach aggregators across the internet — he demanded somebody “do something.”

Reed was spot-on about the school’s negligence. You honestly think Deion Sanders arrived at the University of Colorado, after leaving Jackson State, only to discover the old coach’s stuff in his new office? Those basic expectations in Boulder, Colo., should be the same at Bethune-Cookman. Still, in his rush to rant about the problems and appoint himself some sort of white knight of HBCUs, Reed should have realized these problems aren’t breaking news — and he’s not alone in battling them.

Coaching at an HBCU has similarities to every other job in college sports. Winning matters, as does the decision to avoid certain games and play in others because of financial realities. And — contrary to anyone’s belief that HBCU coaches should sign lifetime covenants to stay at their schools — when possible, the roles should serve as steppingstones for career advancement.

Yet coaching at one of these schools can feel more like a calling. A job requiring patience as much as good play-calling and humility over a Hall of Fame résumé.

Pough won the National Black Championship in 2009, and a couple of years later he could have lost his program when the university was nearly shut down. He has a reputation for sending players to the NFL, yet he’s also known to spend Friday mornings before game day tidying up the visitors’ locker room. His two decades at S.C. State began with the same rage that fueled Reed’s rant: “I can tell you that I fussed a bunch when I came from South Carolina,” Pough told me this week. “I fussed at everybody. I was real, real ugly.”

He just didn’t have Reed’s platform to broadcast those feelings.

What he did have was the passage of time. And over the years, Pough settled in and learned how to navigate the challenges that come with working with a budget that his old friends at South Carolina probably use for shoe money. Time hasn’t softened his passion; instead, it has been redirected and shaped into service, the requirement that comes with his calling as he paints the field or cleans the locker room without fanfare.

“Our schools do a poor job of orienting their hires,” Pough said about what went through his mind as he watched Reed’s video. “I came from the SEC to here, but I knew from past experiences what it was like to be here. There were definitely challenges I was aware of before I came into the door. You owe it to a person when they come in to give them a little bit better perspective on some of those situations, some of those challenges.”

Melendez, who attended Bethune-Cookman and returned to coach his alma mater’s baseball team for 15 years, including 12 as its head coach, shared with me how he would prepare a new HBCU hire such as Reed. Come in ready, wanting to disrupt old ways of thinking. And bring your “A” game because the job deserves your best.

“Treat it like it’s a Power Five job. Treat it like your life depends on it. Treat it like it’s the best job on earth. Don’t treat it like it’s an HBCU job and it’s not worthy of your time and your effort in changing things the way that they should be done,” said Melendez, who entered Bethune-Cookman’s athletics Hall of Fame in 2016. “I just think that the expectations got to be a little bit higher when we take a job.”

Though Melendez didn’t agree with the delivery — Reed has since apologized for the tone and language — he agreed with the message.

“Maybe I wouldn’t go on Instagram Live to do it,” Melendez said. “I would address it internally because that’s just who I am, but Ed Reed is Ed Reed. He has a platform. Him and Deion Sanders can do a much better job than I can in saying, ‘Hey this is not acceptable.’ But you know what, I commend that and I applaud that. Clean it up. Do things the right way. Don’t have the mentality of: ‘Hey, who cares? Nobody’s going to see it.’ And don’t have the mentality that ‘We’re not Miami, so we don’t have to do it like that.’ ”

Reed knows the idyllic world of Power Five perks and NFL accommodations, and if he brings his knowledge — and especially his contacts — to his new job, Bethune-Cookman would be better for it. Melendez or Pough could have shouted to the heavens all day about needing benevolent donors, but Reed — and Sanders before him — possesses a greater megaphone. When Sanders publicized his complaints about the practice field at Jackson State, Walmart swooped in and built him a new one. Who knows whether Reed’s tirade worked like a telethon and enticed a major corporation to throw some money at Bethune-Cookman. Any financial gesture, no matter whether it’s just a ploy to get some good P.R., would benefit the student-athletes. Win, win.

During his broadcast, Reed, smoking a cigar while riding around campus in a golf cart, showed viewers the now-cleared field he and players had cleaned up. He must have forgotten to show off his cape, too. In trying to sound heroic, Reed said he should go home instead of staying at Bethune-Cookman but that he won’t because “of that lady,” pointing to a statue of educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune, the university’s founding mother.

Reed must have sensed the higher calling. Now he should notice everyone else who has stayed to uplift the legacies of the ancestors and guide the new generation. His hand might be more famous, but it’s not the only one on the plow. His peers in coaching, such as Pough, are also doing the dirty work. So many other devoted yet unrecognized men and women are trying to save HBCUs, too. Maybe the problem isn’t their “broken mentality” but rather a busted system that has held back their schools.

Reed’s outrage was warranted. HBCUs do need help. But he isn’t their only savior, and ignoring his less powerful colleagues will only delay the greater mission.

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