Reich said Colts president Bill Polian called and offered him the chance to mentor Manning.
“I was blown away,” said Reich. “I said ‘Give me a little time to think about it.’ I wasn’t quite ready to make that time commitment.”
Polian had drafted Reich in 1985 as Buffalo’s general manager and saw a coaching career in Reich’s future.
“After my rookie season, he called me into his office and said, ‘Hey, you need to be a coach one day. He said ‘Play as long as you can and whenever you retire, I want you to come coach wherever I am.’ ”
Polian also was responsible for bringing Reich to Charlotte while serving as the Panthers general manager in the mid-1990s.
Reich and his family kept Charlotte their home even after his lone season with the Panthers ended in late 1995. Once his playing career with the Jets and Lions was over, he began to sense a call into ministry and enrolled as a student at Reformed Theological Seminary in south Charlotte.
He later was the seminary’s president from 2003 to 2006 before serving 18 months as interim pastor of what is now Ballantyne Presbyterian Church.
Reich, who’d previously had many preaching and speaking opportunities, said he was searching out his life’s calling.
“When I was at the church pastoring, I went into that role in part to see, ‘Is this really the calling on my life? Was everything getting me prepared to do this?’
“After a year and a half of doing it, without getting into a whole long story about it, I just kind of felt like the answer was, ‘At this time, no.’ Maybe there will be a time when it will be the answer.”
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