From casual fan to industry figure: Jordan Reid’s path to ESPN

Before recently landing a job to cover the NFL Draft for ESPN, Jordan Reid built his reputation online by producing intriguing draft content for Minnesota Vikings fans.

Jordan Reid grew up a fan of the Minnesota Vikings

This was before he won three MEAC championships and set the all-time completion percentage record at North Carolina Central University.

This was before he was a prominent NFL Draft analyst at The Draft Network and before he was recently hired by ESPN to be Mel Kiper’s right-hand man during draft season.

Jordan Reid became a fan of the Minnesota Vikings thanks to Hall of Fame wide receiver Randy Moss

Reid was born in High Point, North Carolina in 1991. He found his love for football at the age of seven through the Vikings and their wide receiver phenom, Randy Moss, in 1998.

This loops Reid into one of the four categories of Minnesota fans. Vikings fans share many of the same characteristics and traits, such as loyalty and resiliency to pain. They also share many of the same backstories regarding the tales of their fandom.

Take my father for example, who grew up in Upstate New York and became a Vikings fan in the 1970s from watching Fran Tarkenton scramble around. Tarkenton and the Purple People Eaters generated an entire cohort of Minnesota fans just like Moss did for Millenials, Adrian Peterson did for Gen Z and what Justin Jefferson will do for future generations.

Vikings fans not from the state of Minnesota were typically pulled over to the purple side by either Tarkenton, Moss, or Peterson.

While Reid did not put pads on for the first time until he was 9-years-old, he had already developed a passion for the game that would take him to heights most of us contributing writers only dream about during our day jobs.

Reid took a phone call from me shortly after accepting his new position at ESPN. He was at a nearby high school, visiting a childhood friend who was coaching football. The amount of humility he expressed blew my mind – this is someone at the pinnacle of sports who was taking a phone call from a stranger while visiting a childhood friend.

“He would always talk to me like I was the CEO of a Fortune 500 company,” said Aldo Gandia, founder of the Barroom Network, an online network consisting of Chicago sports entertainment programming. Reid used to contribute to the Barroom Network when it was known as the NFC North Bar Room and he covered the NFL Draft for the Vikings portion of the site.

“He was very appreciative and polite about the opportunity to publish his work. I was appreciative of his efforts and his incredible work,” said Gandia.

Before founding the Barroom Network, Gandia worked at a CBS-owned Chicago media station from 1985 to 1992. Gandia was able to cover the 1985 Chicago Bears team and he even had the opportunity to produce a few of the Mike Ditka shows while the original producer was on vacation. He won an Emmy award for producing his own sports special on the Pan-Am games.

Through his media success, Gandia has been able to connect with some of his favorite Bears players of all time, such as Mike Ditka, Dick Butkus, and Dennis McKinnon.

He has also been able to connect with people who have strong ties to the organization, such as longtime NFL scout Greg Gabriel, who has over 25-years of scouting experience. Gandia has recorded several podcasts with Gabriel and sees a lot of similarities between Gabriel and Reid.

“I see a lot of similarities when they are making evaluations on players in terms of knowing the lexicon of scouting,” Gandia said. “Guys like Jordan and Greg do such a great job of explaining things in an entertaining and informative way and Jordan is so good at making his content digestible for the average fan but interesting for the scholarly fan of football.”

Reid was able to connect with Gandia through a mutual peer in BJ Reidell. Reidell spent five years as a reporter for The Bismarck Tribune out of North Dakota before meeting Gandia on the internet. Reidell then became the editor for the Vikings portion of the NFC North Bar Room and he connected with Reid on Twitter after putting out a tweet to gauge the interest of content creators to contribute to their site.

“It was like an unpaid internship,” Reidell said. “Jordan was one of the first people who responded.”

At the time, Jordan Reid was not only unknown in the scouting world, he was unknown in the world of Twitter as well.

When Reid first reached out to the NFC North Bar Room, he was writing under the Twitter handle @ultravikesfan and keeping an anonymous identity as a blogger.

“I asked him to send me an email of his general background before he started working at the site and I was blown away by his email as well as his humility,” Reidell said. “This was someone coming from a QB background who won championships and set records in college. I told him to just promote himself as himself, he already had a ton of credibility.”

Thus, @JReidDraftScout was born.

I credit this Twitter handle as the reason I became interested in sports media. This Twitter handle showed me that I could voice my own thoughts, promote my own work, and connect with Vikings fans just as passionate as myself.

The abundance of content that @JReidDraftScout would put out made me believe he was already connected to a company with the status of ESPN. I did not realize at the time how rapidly he was ascending in the industry and that this Twitter handle would eventually become @Jordan_Reid, the NFL Draft analyst for ESPN.

While I credit Reid on why I started to write, his emergence to the sports media scene was generated from a different inspiration.

“The reason I started my Twitter account was to complain about the Vikings not signing Michael Johnson after they hired Mike Zimmer,” Reid said. “I used it as a way to vent, I did not have any followers back then I just needed to get things off my chest.”

Reid took to different outlets such as Twitter and Blogger.com to vent. The quantity and quality of his content started to attract the attention of other people in the industry.

“It was easily 40 tweets a day,” Reidell said about the content Reid would push out. “This was pertinent information that people were genuinely interested in. I was learning stuff from him daily and at the time I considered myself to be as knowledgeable as anyone when it came to the draft.”

Reid worked his way up to join The Viking Age back in 2017 while he was still coaching at his Alma Mater. It was here he formed a relationship with the current editor of The Viking Age, Adam Patrick.

The two had crossed paths during their own separate blogging journeys at VikingsTerritory.com, and Patrick knew and held a lot of respect for the value Reid brought to the table.

“When I became the Co-Editor of the site, I wanted to add some people that I knew could take the site to new levels. I knew that Jordan was extremely passionate about the draft and he would immediately give TVA credibility when it came to our draft coverage,” Patrick said. “With Jordan leading the way, TVA was able to begin its emergence as a place for Vikings fans to come to for quality content about the team and the draft.”

From The Viking Age, Reid began solidifying his reputation in the industry and accepted a full-time job as a draft analyst at The Draft Network before eventually entering his new role at ESPN.

Reid has had many “hits” over his career as a draft analyst. Jaire Alexander, Marcus Peters, and James Robinson are among a few of his “Draft Crushes” who he scouted in their college days and are having successful NFL careers.

“Everyone always likes to talk about the hits,” Reid said. “One thing that was especially eye-opening for me was the criticism of the internet, as I did not fully understand the media side of things when I started.”

These experiences became valuable to his development as an analyst, something he intrinsically has a skill for. One of the most educational experiences of his career was scouting Laquon Treadwell, as it taught him the importance of a wide receiver being able to separate from a defender when running a route.

While Treadwell had a lot of success at the college level, given his natural physical attributes, his difficulty to create separation at the NFL level is ultimately why he has had trouble sticking to pro rosters.

Among Reid’s famous scouting mottos are, “scout the player, not the helmet logo,” in regards to pigeon-holing prospects that come out of certain schools.

For example, Texas Tech quarterbacks normally received a bad reputation from scouts because the Air-Raid style of offense they typically played in did not translate over to the NFL. But a Texas Tech quarterback by the name of Patrick Mahomes solidified scouting the player and not the logo.

While Reid does have to produce his content without any bias, he still roots for the Vikings. He loved Minnesota’s 2021 draft and he believes that they filled a lot of holes on the current roster. But he also felt the Vikings needed to, “value EDGE rusher a little bit more.”  Among his favorite picks were Wyatt Davis, Kellen Mond, and Camryn Bynum

“I loved the Mond pick because drafting a quarterback is like buying a lottery ticket. You never know how it is going to play out and it could play out in a big way,” Reid said.

His talent aside, Reid’s work ethic is what allowed him to reach the heights he sits upon today. From blogging anonymously to writing for fan sites for free, Reid’s sacrifices, quality of work, and relentless effort have contributed to his ultimate rise in the sports world.

“His path to success is the blueprint for other young people to make it in this industry,” said Gandia.