COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Sitting in Texas A&M’s sprawling athletics cafeteria, which serves everything from fresh-baked pizza to hibachi, Aggies starting quarterback Marcel Reed is sneaking in bites of fried shrimp during a mid-August interview.
The through line of the conversation keeps coming back to goals.
Reed wants Texas A&M to finish better in 2025 after the program squandered a SEC championship opportunity with a 1-3 record to end the regular season. He often thinks of his dropped snap in the fourth quarter against Auburn last year. He needs to finish his plate (and maybe a to-go pizza). A big goal of his is to pack on muscle.
The son of Tennessee State’s all-time leading tackler — former Tigers coach Rod Reed — and the grandson of a former NFL offensive lineman, Reed’s build belies that generational bulk. He’s a slender 6-foot-2, 182 pounds. “I got my mom’s genes,” Reed said.
He got her speed, too. Yet even that dynamic ability in the open field ties into his internal aspirations for the year.
America at large was introduced to Reed on Sept. 26, 2024, in a primetime game against No. 8 LSU. Conner Weigman started the game for the Aggies, but they inserted Reed in the third quarter to create a spark. That he did. Reed’s first touch, an 8-yard touchdown run, cut LSU’s led to 17-14. He’d go on to run for more touchdowns (3) than he did attempt passes (2). It didn’t matter. The Aggies won 38-23 and ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit described Reed at one point as “lightning” during a touchdown run.
Reed never gave Weigman the job back. That run-first narrative that was created in primetime never, at least in Reed’s view, shook off him either.
Ahead of another showcase game for No. 16 Texas A&M against the No. 8 team in the country on Saturday — this time at Notre Dame — Reed hopes he can accomplish one of his overriding individual goals for the year.
Yeah, he can run. Yeah, he may have only completed 56% of his passes in high school. But he’s ready for everyone to view him as a quarterback.
“A passing quarterback,” Reed emphasizes.
Rod Reed remembers watching his son’s AAU squad get bullied. Playing a team from nearby Memphis, Marcel kept driving and he kept getting fouled. Hard. It rattled him. Rod remembers pulling his 9- or 10-year-old son aside and saying: “You got to toughen up and play.”
There were tears. There were also a lot of points.
“He was mad,” Rod Reed said. “You could see they poked the bear a little bit.”
Reed grew up as a high-level basketball and baseball player, playing AAU and travel baseball well into high school. He rarely traveled to football camps. He only played 7-on-7 for one season.
At Montgomery Ball Academy in Nashville, Reed played for a run-first team. He didn’t throw for more than 1,600 yards — despite starting for four years — until his senior year of high school.
Reed didn’t necessarily lack attention as a recruit. 247Sports ranked him as a four-star prospect and many blue-blood programs offered him. But Reed believes his reputation as a run-first QB traces back to high school.
“It’s been following me around since,” Reed said.
What gets lost amid that storyline is his growth. Reed completed just 54% of his passes as a full-time starter his sophomore year of high school. That jumped to 55% as a junior and 59% as a senior.
Even during his starting debut with A&M a season ago, you saw a change with additional reps. Reed first subbed for Weigman from Weeks 2 through 5. He completed 54.4% of his passes in that stretch. When he came back into the lineup in late October until the end of the season, his completion percentage jumped to 64.5%.
Aggies offensive coordinator Collin Klein, himself a QB with a run-first reputation back in his heyday at Kansas State, trusted Reed to make protection adjustments and some checks at the line of scrimmage by season’s end.
“I think he’s just growing into a quarterback,” Klein said.
Goal setting is not a restrained process for Reed. It’s part of the reason earlier this offseason he walked into a media availability and made public an aggressive accuracy bar he hopped to clear in 2025: 70% passing.
That’s a mark only seven qualifying FBS quarterbacks hit a season ago. For Reed, that metric doesn’t include throwaways or drops — he’s viewing it through the adjusted completion lens — but that’s a mark that feels obtainable as he enters Year 2 in Klein’s offense.
Reed, whose adjusted completion percentage sits at 72.7% through two games per PFF, made mechanical adjustments this offseason to reach that aim. He began working with Dallas-based private quarterback coach Jeff Christensen, whose clients include Patrick Mahomes and Baker Mayfield.
Klein recommended Christensen to Reed, knowing Christensen could help Reed shorten an occasionally elongated throwing motion. Christensen made a few changes with his sequencing and load phase to speed things up. It’s working. Reed is getting the ball out more than a quarter of a second faster (2.84 seconds versus 3.11 seconds) than he did a year ago.
“Queuing up the film from last year to this year, it’s just way different,” Christensen said. “His accuracy and spin are way different.”
Klein sees the change. He’s also quick to add a year’s worth of reps have helped Reed. The game slowed down for him from a processing standpoint. Reed’s eyes are finally starting to catch up with his feet.
It helps that Texas A&M upgraded the pieces around Reed.
The Aggies’ offensive line is arguably the most experienced in the country. As Reed puts it, “Those are 100% sirs,” with an average time in college of five years between them.
Wide receiver is where the Aggies have seen the biggest change. Texas A&M did not create explosive pass plays with any consistency a season ago, finishing 88th nationally in passes of 20-plus yards. This year, the Aggies sit ninth nationally through two games, largely thanks to the four-star transfer portal additions of Mississippi State’s Mario Craver and NC State’s KC Concepcion, who have combined for 22 catches for 381 yards and six touchdowns through two games. Throw in a healthy running back room after a barrage of injuries last season, and Reed is bullish on Texas A&M’s offensive options.
“We can stretch the field (this year,)” Reed said. “It helps when you have receivers who can run past people and an O-line that can protect. … . It’s hard to stop the run with us. If you try and stop the run we’ll take it downfield.”
Texas A&M had a chance to sign a transfer quarterback this winter. At least one high-profile passer was shopped to them, per sources, but the Aggies instead opted to invest in a redshirt freshman who had shown flashes of game-changing ability.
Reed may think about the Auburn game, a 43-41 overtime loss, as a missed opportunity. Texas A&M coach Mike Elko chooses to remember Reed leading a nine-play, 80-yard touchdown drive to take the lead with four minutes remaining.
“You’ve seen a lot of growth and maturation from him,” Texas A&M coach Mike Elko said. “If you look at the numbers and stats, you will see a kid who had a very productive year amongst some of the younger quarterbacks in this league. He’s going to have a great year.”
That belief is not lost on Reed.
He watched Netflix’s SEC documentary this offseason and heard LSU coach Brian Kelly say his mortgage payments depend on the performance of 18-to-22-year olds. It’s part of the reason Reed pushed so hard this offseason to make a leap in his second year as the starter.
“I came here for a reason, to bring this program everything they want,” Reed said.
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Christensen is perhaps a tad bias in his analysis of Reed, but he’s quick to compare Reed to NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year Jayden Daniels. They’re similarly thin-framed athletes with immense upside as passers.
With three more years of eligibility, including 2025, Christensen believes Reed can reach that level. His talent is the prerequisite for that prediction. The way he approaches being coached and his work ethic are the reasons why Christensen is so confident lobbing such lofty comparisons.
“His makeup as a human being and his ability to be trusted with a lot of responsibility from the coaches and those around him and his willingness to do the right thing is at a level at that basically I’ve met only three other guys in my life have the same kind of concentration and fortitude as he (does),” Christensen said. “He just wants to be great. His actions match his words.”
As Reed finishes his plate and prepares for an afternoon practice, he again returns to the idea of goals. They’re scribbled in his meeting book notes and are one of the first things he looks at each morning.
Included among them is something Daniels did not too long ago.
“Hopefully (college football views me) as the Heisman winner,” Reed said. “If I can play well enough, get my team into the playoffs, people can call me that. That’s been my dream since I was a kid.
“I don’t write down goals I think I can’t reach.”
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