Receiver David Bell ‘pushes through’ rookie year with Browns
BEREA — David Bell wasn’t the Browns’ first draft pick last April. The receiver, though, may have been one of the most notable.
A big reason for that is just the position Bell plays. A receiver, especially one who put up the kind of stats in college as he did at Purdue, is going to generate a lot of buzz.
As Bell reflected on his first season, the thing he couldn’t help but notice most wasn’t the speed of the game or the quickness of the opposing players. Instead, it was the marathon-like grind going from training camp in July to the regular-season finale in January that he acknowledged he wasn’t prepared for coming into the league.
“It’s a very long season,” Bell told the Beacon Journal as he cleaned out his locker last Monday. “You have to be mentally and physically prepared for it. College, for three straight years, I would be done after 12 games.”
That wasn’t the case for Bell’s first season with the Browns. Instead of being done after 12 games, there remained five more games to play.
Bell played only four of those final five games, as he was inactive for a Week 15 win over the Baltimore Ravens due to a foot injury. In the other four games, he was limited to just four catches for 45 yards.
Bell finished the season with 24 catches for 241 yards. The stats may not have been exactly what he was looking for but, considering the acclimation process he went through as a rookie, it was a satisfactory start.
“I think once I hit that point of having to finally push through it, it was good,” Bell said. “It was good to finally get out there and get the first season under my wings so I can look back and reflect on the things I did well and the things I need to improve on.”
One of the things Bell knows will be critical going forward is staying on the field. His first training camp started off with him on the physically unable to perform list because of a foot injury he suffered late in the June minicamp.
Bell finally got on the field in early August and even started the season opener at Carolina. From there, the learning process accelerated for him.
That process has left Bell with a lengthy list of things he knows he has to improve on in order to become a more consistent contributor in the Browns offense.
“I mean, it’s kind of hard to say, because it’s really a week-by-week thing,” Bell said. “So I haven’t really had a chance to sit down and to look over all 17 games of things I need to really improve on. I’d probably say, just off the top of my head, I’d probably just have to say being able to understand defenses a little bit more. There’s a lot of disguises that were different from last year coming into the NFL. It’s a lot more of that.”
That’s just part of the learning process, though. If there’s anything a young receiver isn’t fully prepared for when he gets to the NFL, it’s the defenses he’s going to go up against.
It’s not just the complexities of those defenses, though, that make it a challenge. Bell’s veteran teammate Amari Cooper said in an interview with the Beacon Journal in early October the jump in the caliber of defensive backs a receiver sees on a play-by-play basis is something a rookie has to adjust to more than anything else.
“The corners are just a lot better,” Cooper said. “That’s the biggest transition. Sometimes it takes guys by surprise because the separation isn’t as much as you will get playing on the collegiate level. So when the ball is coming to you at the catch point, it’s an easier ball to catch [in college].
“That’s why a lot of times that you will see a guys throughout his whole college career, you know, he had great hands, phenomenal hands, then when he gets in the league, he starts dropping more balls, not because his hands are worse, just because the coverage is better. It’s just harder to catch those balls.”