Super intriguing guy

papasmurfbell · May 7, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/06/sports/football/nfl-prospect-from-princeton-hits-right-notes.html?_r=0

N.F.L. Prospect From Princeton Hits Right Notes

PRINCETON, N.J. — The window shades were pulled low in the office of Steve Verbit, the longtime Princeton associate football coach. Caraun Reid was about to watch film. The N.F.L. draft was less than a month away, and Reid, a decorated Ivy League defensive tackle, cued the footage: Jets versus Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Sept. 8, 2013.
Suddenly, guilt flashed across Reid’s face.
“Could they have used me at the ceremony?” Reid asked, looking up from the monitor. Verbit did not quite understand.
“I was asked to sing,” Reid said. “Could they have used me singing at the ceremony?”
There are about as many YouTube videos of the 305-pound Reid crooning on stage as there are of him tackling. His rich, dulcet tones made him a star of Princeton’s sonant circuit. There was his a cappella group (Old NasSoul); his jazz band (he plays guitar and drums); his gospel singing as an executive board member of the campus ministry program (meetings every Friday).
Princeton wanted Reid to showcase his solo singing talent during its ceremony to introduce the new athletic director, Mollie Marcoux, on this April afternoon. Reid politely declined, several times. Thanks but no thanks. He is an N.F.L. prospect. He is preparing for Thursday’s draft. He has got hours of film to watch.

But now came a guilty feeling.
“I thought you were going to sing,” said a woman walking past Reid in the hallway as he walked out to the practice field later that day.
“Could have used you out there,” Coach Bob Surace said to him a few moments later.
Reid sighed. Does Jadeveon Clowney get this sort of attention? Johnny Manziel?
Manziel may be known as Johnny Football, but at Princeton, Reid’s nickname practically became Johnny Everything.

He is, with certainty, the only Jamaican-dialect-speaking Bronx native in this N.F.L. draft, who wears glasses, sings bass, taught an elementary school class and graduated in December with a sociology degree. Projected by some to be selected as early as the third round, Reid could become Princeton’s highest draft pick since Charlie Gogolak went sixth over all in 1966.
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In order for that to happen, Reid needed to convince scouts and team executives of one thing: How much does he love football?
“Sometimes you go to a school and the red flags are guys who are troubled or not responsive,” said Surace, who fielded calls all spring from scouts and team executives. “They want to know — does this guy love meetings, love film room, love the weight room, practice hard?”
After Princeton ended its season as co-Ivy champions with Harvard at 8-2, and Reid finished his final semester, it was the first time in his life he had had no obligations other than football. Which is not to say he dropped his other interests.
There has always been church. Reid’s father, Courton A. Reid, is the bishop at City of Faith, Church of God, a Pentecostal church in the Williamsbridge section of the north Bronx. His mother is a minister. Sundays for Caraun and his two brothers consisted of a full day of worship, from religious school at 10 a.m. until the conclusion of an evening service, after dinner.
If there was an N.F.L. game on during the few hours of free time, Reid said, “you can sort of watch it.”

But football was tertiary, behind faith and family, and in the Bronx, opportunities were limited. Reid said his parents forbade him to sign up for youth football after a shooting took place in the stands of a junior high school game. So Reid did not start playing organized ball until his freshman year of high school, at Mount St. Michael Academy, where, at 5 foot 11 inches and 180 pounds, he tried out as a fullback.
“I was being blocked by guys who were 160,” Reid said. “The coaches moved me to the line pretty much immediately.”
Reid hardly imagined he might become only the eighth Bronx native drafted since 1990. His parents, natives of St. Ann, on the north coast of Jamaica, instructed him to maintain balance in his life, marrying athletics with music, schoolwork and worship.
“We believe in that — we believe our children should be well-rounded,” Courton Reid said. “We’d say you never know what could be your niche.”

When Reid arrived at Princeton (he had received only one Division I-A scholarship offer, from Marshall), he said, he was woefully behind his position mates.
“I knew A-gap, B-gap,” Reid said. “I knew the basics, but in terms of technique coaching at my high school, we didn’t do much of that. It was, ‘O.K., quarterback goes back, you sack the quarterback.’ ”
Five years later, despite incessant double teams and a switch from outside end to nose tackle his senior year, Reid finished as Princeton’s first two-time all-American (Football Champion Subdivision) in 20 years and a three-time all-Ivy League selection.
His appeal to N.F.L. scouts seems to stem from the notion that he remains relatively raw.
Chuck Smith, a former N.F.L. All-Pro defensive lineman in the 1990s, invited Reid to his pass-rushing academy in Georgia last summer. He observed that Reid, initially, did not quite feel he belonged among the best collegiate defensive linemen in the nation. Over the course of the camp, however, that seemed to change.

“I think there’s a difference between football knowledge and book knowledge,” Smith said. “He has the best of both worlds.”
Perhaps Reid’s defining moment as an N.F.L. prospect came at the Senior Bowl in February. Reid opened eyes with sacks on consecutive plays against Baylor’s Cyril Richardson and Miami’s Brandon Linder.
Reid said he figured out how to beat both players by watching film, right there on Verbit’s monitor. On Linder, he took mental note of a tendency.
“I beat him every time at inside-move counters,” Reid said. “I’d looked at his tape, and I just knew.”
That is why he passed up singing at the new A.D.’s ceremony. Too much work to be done.
Back in Verbit’s office, Reid waded into the Jets-Bucs game footage, watching Gerald McCoy, Tampa Bay’s Pro Bowl defensive tackle.
“There —watch his hands,” Reid said. “That was a nice rip.”
At the scouting combine, Reid said, he sat for interviews with coaches and team executives as they subtly questioned his passion. He acknowledged there might be a team out there that passes on him because he went to an Ivy League school, never breathed-ate-slept football, and maybe never will.
This is where he believes he makes up for some of that, though, in the film room, putting his intellect and advanced memory recall into effect. That is, if distractions do not pervade.
Outside the door, the song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams could be heard as it was being sung, not so mellifluously, by one of Reid’s teammates at the ceremony he skipped. Reid could not help pausing the tape for a moment and listening.