Ed Reed weighs in on Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, Ravens' win over Steelers

Now that former Ravens star free safety Ed Reed has joined the media, the former NFL Defensive Player of the Year is in the position of commenting on his former team as well as weighing in on former teammate Ray Rice and his high-profile domestic violence incident.

Reed told The Baltimore Sun during Ravens senior advisor of player development O.J. Brigance's 45th birthday party last weekend that he's trying to strike a balance between doing his job and remaining supportive of Rice.

"The Ray Rice situation, what happened, yeah, it's terrible," said Reed, a rookie analyst for Showtime's Inside the NFL program. "I'm not defending domestic violence, by any means. At the same time, I've seen on Twitter and social networks how domestic violence has affected other people even worse with women set on fire, beautiful women hurt badly by people who are truly sick in this world. Who's to say one situation is worse than another situation."

Reed said he's also reached out through text messages to Rice, whose $35 million contract was terminated by the Ravens last week with the NFL indefinitely suspending him and declaring him ineligible to sign with another NFL team.

"I've been sending him positive words," Reed said. "I've been telling him to keep working out. I know it's tough. If he wants to talk, I told him just to text me. From this side, I know a bunch of teams need running backs."

Reed took issue with the video of Rice punching his then-fiancee, Janay, whom he later married, constantly being replayed on television and on the Internet.
"We're all human, but society loves that stuff to some degree," Reed said. "It's like watching the news, I don't even watch the news anymore because it's always something bad. We need compassion, love and a bunch of mirrors in our houses.  We need to look at ourselves and  really search our hearts. We all make mistakes. How can we take the situation and make it better? We are all in the construction site of life.

"There's bricks lying everywhere to be thrown or you can take bricks and build people up. There's people at the construction site waiting with bricks in hand versus, 'I'm going to stack this to build up a nice foundation of life to benefit from.' It takes a village. We are all in it together. We are one community. We are one village. That's what we need to really understand. We're all the same. You cut us and we all bleed the same."

Reed said it's a challenge for him to comment on Rice.

"I'm on your side now on the media side and to have to talk about someone who's close to you, it's difficult," Reed said. "It's like family. It does get hard. You have to do your job and you want to do it the right way. You have people looking over your shoulder on Twitter, but you're not going to please everybody."

Reed, who is now working for Showtime's Inside the NFL,  also weighed in on the Adrian Peterson situation. The Minnesota Vikings running back has been arrested for causing injuries to his 4-year-old son for hitting him with a "switch," and injuring his legs, back, hands and private parts.

"Man, all of us have been whipped before," Reed said. "I picked my own switch as a child. If you're child's not listening to you, he's not going to listen to that officer one day. We all grew up in different environments and were raised differently.

"Who knows the true relationship between him and his girl for her to report that? I'm going to continue to discipline my child. As parents, we tend to go too far. My parents went too far at times. I bet his kid will be better for that."

Reed attended the Ravens' 26-6 win over the Pittsburgh Steelers on Thursday night, an AFC North win that evened their record.

"You know as well as I do that Pittsburgh's not very good," Reed said. "Pittsburgh will get better as the season goes by the way they always do, as will the Ravens. It's hard to say what it all means, but I do know Pittsburgh's not very good.

"It was a great win. You can't go down 0-2 in the division. This next game could be a tough one. Cleveland actually has a pretty decent team."


(baltimoresun.com)