Sal Maiorana

@salmaiorana

Ed Reed was selected to play in nine Pro Bowls during his career with the Ravens.

Reed made 64 interceptions during his NFL career.

Reed played seven years in Baltimore while Rex Ryan was coaching defense for the Ravens.

When Ed Reed was growing up in New Orleans in the 1980s, Saints fans wore bags on their heads, not as some silly fashion statement, but to mask the fact that they bore allegiance to one of the NFL’s sad-sack franchises.

Not young Ed. He simply ignored the woebegone Saints and became a fan of the dynastic San Francisco 49ers who were the team of that decade, winners of four Super Bowls between 1981-89.

“Hey, I love my home team, but I was a San Francisco fan, I’m a Joe Montana fan,” Reed admitted. “That’s just how it is. When you’re a kid and you’re watching sports growing up, who’s winning those championships? You tend to gravitate to winners, which is a good thing. Who wants to follow losers? Just saying.”

And so, Reed cannot bemoan the fact that his 8-year-old son, Edward, is a New England Patriots fan. Yes, the same Patriots who were a fierce rival of Reed’s when he played for the Baltimore Ravens at a time when those teams seemed to annually play each other in the playoffs. The same Patriots who are the despised rival of his new employer, the Bills, perhaps the most hated franchise in Buffalo sports fandom history, even surpassing the 1970s Miami Dolphins.

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“His mom is from Boston, though she’s not a Patriots fan, and his grandmother lives up there and the kid likes champions, man. What can I say?” Reed said with a smile. “He’s adjusting (to his father now working for the Bills). When he came here, he left me some notes on my board. He draws me some Bills stuff when I come home. It’s the best. But in his heart, I know.”

In reference to Reed’s question about who wants to follow losers, Bills fans don’t want to, yet they undyingly do, year after year after year as Buffalo has had just two winning seasons since the arrival of the 21st century. Conversely, Reed played on only three losing teams in 11 seasons with the Ravens between 2002 and 2012, and in seven of those years Baltimore made the playoffs, winning a Super Bowl his last year there. In college at the University of Miami, he played on the Hurricanes’ 2001 national championship team.

Losing is unnatural to Reed, a man who intercepted 64 passes, scored 10 return touchdowns, was a nine-time Pro Bowl pick and will be a first-ballot Hall of Famer a few years from now. Given that pedigree, Rex Ryan is hoping that hiring Reed to coach Buffalo’s safeties and help develop a winning culture will go a long way toward extricating the Bills from their 16-year abyss.

Sal Maiorana and Leo Roth go position-by-position on the Bills roster in the newest edition of the SalSpeak podcast.

“He’s more like the pied piper, people follow him,” Ryan said of Reed, who he coached for seven years in Baltimore and for the last half of the 2013 season in New York when Reed closed out his magnificent career with the Jets. “And that was even when he wasn’t the dominant player that he used to be with Baltimore,” Ryan continued. “When I had him with the Jets, he took that whole group and they’d follow him. They all want part of that wisdom he has and I thought for our team, you can’t have a better guy.”

How magnetic is Reed’s pull? Defensive end/linebacker Jerry Hughes never has and never will play safety, but he can’t get enough of Reed’s philosophies about the game.

“We all grew up watching him, we’re all big fans,” Hughes said. “So just for him to be around us, someone who’s been out there on the field playing it at 100 miles per hour, someone who understands the defense because he kind of grew up in it, he’s definitely adding that element where he’s becoming really relatable to us. You know, breaking it down into terms we understand so we can use it on the game field and just play a whole lot faster.”

Aaron Williams is the Bills’ top safety, and as Ryan expected, almost the moment Reed joined the Bills, Williams was tuned in to what the 2004 NFL defensive player of the year was talking about.

“I mean Ed is a Hall of Famer,” said Williams. “He brings so much to the table. Not only being a coach, but a guy that has actually been there, that has been on the field, that was a player for X amount of years. So bringing that knowledge into the room is actually going to help us a lot. Ed is really going to bring my game to the next level. I’m trying to be where Ed is at.”

What’s interesting, though, is Reed is back to being a rookie. He has never been a coach at any level, except for at his annual youth football camp — “They call me Coach Reed,” he said. He knew what to do as a player, and now he’s feeling his way through the process of wearing a ball cap instead of a helmet.

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“It taught me how much football I didn’t know,” he said. “Coaches are here all the time, and it gives me a different appreciation for what coaches do, obviously, and for what they know. This defense, oh my God, it’s (the Ryans’) heart and soul. I thought I knew it, and I do know it from a player’s perspective, but it’s definitely different being on this side of it. So I’m learning so much more football being on this side, it’s amazing, really.”

What fans will notice over the next few weeks at St. John Fisher College is that Reed preaches communication. He always wants the safeties talking because those are the guys — Williams and Corey Graham — who dictate what’s going on. For the Ryan defense to work, everyone has to be on the same page, and that was clearly not the case in 2015.

“I couldn’t coach here, couldn’t coach the safeties, if they’re not communicating,” Reed said. “It’s a given, you have to talk out there. If you’re not talking, something’s wrong. In order for you to talk, you have to understand your job, what you have to do to get guys lined up. If you’re not talking, you’re not going to be successful.”

Reed watched every snap of defense from last year, and he could see right away what was wrong.

“If you watch the film from last year, you saw a lot of confusion, a lot of not communicating and guys not giving effort,” he said. “So with that in mind, there couldn’t have been too much communicating out there. Some of the offensive guys even said it; you could hear a pin drop last year. So for us to be effective, that’s got to happen. For where we were last year from what I heard, we’ve gotten a lot better.”

MAIORANA@Gannett.com

Your Guide to Bills Camp

For 27 years, Sal Maiorana has been all about letting the fans of western New York keep up on the Buffalo Bills, from the field to the front office. When the Bills hit the turf Saturday for the opening of their 17th camp at St. John Fisher College, Sal will be there to share everything that is Bills. Reach him at MAIORANA@gannett.com or follow him on Twitter @salmaiorana.