As West Virginia completed spring football on Saturday in their Gold-Blue Spring Game, head coach Neal Brown took the opportunity to address the the 6-foot-10, 285-pound elephant in the room — Jimmy Bell.
Bell had worked out with West Virginia football over the final two weeks of spring practice. He participated in the spring game where he played at offensive tackle. While he got beat a couple times and was called for a penalty, that was to be expected with him not having played football since high school.
“He worked out for two weeks fundamentally and then today was his sixth practice. You see improvement,” Brown said. “And now there’s some things too that today was probably the second time nobody was out there telling him what to do. Like he got beat for a sack today because he didn’t set off the ball.”
Brown also said with Bell’s size brings a lot of opportunity for the starting center on West Virginia’s basketball team this past season to play football.
“In pass protection if he’ll get depth in his set, he’s going to be really hard to beat just because his arms are so long,” Brown added. “To give you some perspective, tackles usually NFL, talk about wingspan, they’re usually in the 84-85 (inches), he’s 87-plus (inches). He’s really long. And so there’s some fundamental things and just flow of the game that he’s got to get into.”
The next steps seem to point to Brown adding Bell to the football roster. He has two years of eligibility remaining for football, and with the additions and returners West Virginia basketball has, it would make sense for Bell to make the move.
“He and I are going to spend some time early part of this week and I’ll talk to Coach Huggins and I think we’ll come to a pretty quick resolution on where this all stands,” Brown said.
