Pro Football Hall-of-Famer Ed Reed won’t be the next coach at Bethune Cookman after he said the school wouldn’t ratify the contract he’d agreed to in late December.

Reed announced through his foundation Saturday that Bethune Cookman — an Historically Black university in Daytona Beach, Fla. — “won’t make good on the agreement we had in principle, which had provisions and resources best needed to support the student athletes.” Reed later informed the team’s players in person of the decision, a tear-filled, 15-minute goodbye in which he said the decision was not his.

Saturday’s move comes five days after Reed posted a profanity-laced video on social media, in which he criticized Bethune Cookman officials for having a dirty campus and failing to clean his office before he arrived. He apologized for his “lack of professionalism” the following day and again Saturday.

“I’m a good man, not perfect,” he said. “We all make mistakes, and I apologized for mine.”

Reed, an All-America safety at the University of Miami who went on to a Hall of Fame career with the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens, was hired Dec. 27 by Bethune Cookman athletics director Reggie Theus, a former NBA player. He was to replace Terry Sims, who was fired after going 38-39 in seven seasons.

The 44-year-old Reed was the latest in a series of “celebrity coaches” hired at HBCU programs despite little to no on-field college coaching experience, a trend begun after the runaway success of Deion Sanders at Jackson State. Sanders went 27-6 with a pair of conference championships in three seasons with the Tigers, and was hired in December as head coach at Colorado.

Two other well-known figures hired by HBCUs have had less success. Former Heisman Trophy-winning running back Eddie George is 9-13 in two years at Tennessee State, while Hue Jackson — who coached in college in the 1990s but had spent two decades in the NFL — went 3-8 in his debut season at Grambling State in 2022.