New Story Kelvin Bell Q&A

[Blair Sanderson]

Bell sells opportunity at Iowa

Tom Kakert • HawkeyeReport.com
@hawkeyereport



OPENING STATEMENT

Tonight will be our 9th practice and I am working with the defensive line. From what I am seeing from our guys, we have a really good group. One of the things we talked about going into spring ball with them was leadership.

We didn’t lose a lot of reps with Jake Hulett and Dan Gaffey, but we lost leadership with Nathan Bazata, who was a leader in our program.

The theme going into this spring was leadership. We talk about knowing the way, showing the way, and going the way. There are a lot of guy in there that know what we expect. We need more guys to show the young guys what we expect. And we need more guys, those younger guys, to start going the way.

I’m pleased with those guys. The most important thing in any spring is we want to remain healthy, and we are. The competition is great and it’s good for everybody because we are going to need everybody to play.

Tonight’s scrimmage will be good for us because we will get some guys to play that normally might not play and look at those guys in some good team reps.

Q: Looking at defensive end, you have your top four back. How does someone move up and break into that top four at the position?

BELL: For me and all of our coaching staff it’s about trust. You have an opportunity to build trust every day. That’s something that we stress with our players. You don’t just build trust on game day. You build trust every single day that you come into this building, whether it be what you do in the classroom, out in the community, or on the field.

Their job is to impress us. Any snap they get is an opportunity to impress. As that trust grows, then their opportunity to play grows. Just do what we ask.

Q: Chauncey Goldston have moved inside. How is that experiment going?

BELL: In recruiting, we recruit defensive linemen. To take a kid and say he’s just an end or just a tackle, I think that would be doing a disservice to our group in the room. He spent a year as a redshirt at defensive end and then another year at defensive end. Sliding into defensive tackle, the training and the keys are the same. It’s not an experiment. We are just trying to get another guy ready to play. We want you to play and put you in at end or tackle and expect you to do the job or you aren’t going to play.

It’s going good. He has handled it well. The only thing I told him was the difference between end and tackle is everything happens faster on the inside. You are closer to the ball, there’s not a lot of space, and you have guys on either side of you. Once that ball is snapped, you are playing blocks just like you are at end.

Q: Do you see any similarities between Brady Reiff and Nathan Bazata?

BELL: Not a lot of similarities between those two. Bazata is a thicker guy. Brady came here at 235 pounds and had to build himself to what you see how. Bazata came in here at a solid 280. Both of them have a wrestling background, so I guess that makes them similar. Brady didn’t come in here at a natural defensive lineman. He was a stand-up outside linebacker, so he is still learning the position. Bazata has been a nose tackle since the day he was born. While Brady is still learning, Bazata was further ahead in that regard.

Q: What have you seen nationally with the new recruiting rules regarding earlier official visits? Are you seeing any trends and how are you guys approaching it?

BELL: Going through twitter, you are seeing some guys put out early official visit dates.

I have friends in the coaching profession and we talk and everyone is pretty mum as far as are you going to use spring official visits or aren’t you? Kids can’t keep a secret. They want you to know they are visiting a campus.

As far as the signing day, and this is how it should be, but it’s not, from August to December, every high school kid should be worried about winning a state championship. They shouldn’t be worried about where am I going on Saturday. They should be worried about being the best high school senior or junior that they can be.

Putting the signing day there has sped everything up. Those kids that want to focus on their senior season, they have to get on campus now. The one thing that I think is a benefit for us in terms of a selling point is, a lot of things can happen in college football. Coaches move around and the landscape doesn’t look the same in August as it does in January the next year. With the kids that we are recruiting now, one thing that they can bank on is it’s going to look the same around here, regardless of if you are coming here now or committing here now, I can guarantee you that we will be here in January.

Q: So, do you look at the early visits on a case by case basis? Like if you have a kid from Florida where it makes sense to bring them in early?

BELL: Totally case by case because the thing is with an official visit, and most kids will tell you this, if you come for a full day unofficial visit here or anywhere else, that official visit is going to look similar. The only difference is the school is picking up the bill.

You are going to see the campus. You are going to see the stadium. You are going to put the jersey on. How many times do you need to do that before you make your decision? I can understand kids wanting to take in the game day atmosphere. I am all for it and you need to see that. If you are able to do that unofficially as a junior, then what’s going change as a senior?

Q: Are official visits not as important as they used to be?

BELL: Not saying they aren’t as important. What I am saying is with kids taking more unofficial visits and you do see kids traveling more now, it’s another opportunity. If it’s the kids only opportunity to get on campus, then it is 100% important.

If that kid has been on campus four, five, or six times already and you paid for it, what does that change or accomplish?

https://iowa.rivals.com/news/bell-sells-opportunity-at-iowa

 

[Blair Sanderson]

Q: How much can you sell Josh Jackson and James Daniels, guys that will go high in the draft?

BELL: You sell it because those guys have star power and those kids recognize those names. What they don’t know are the stories behind them. They just see Saturday. They see the interceptions. They see James Daniels blocking, but they don’t understand how James arrived at Iowa.

Those stories behind that are much more meaningful. They impact the kids more. How they arrived to get that that point. We didn’t recruit Josh Jackson with the thought that he would be a consensus All American. We wanted him to come in, fit into our culture, and do the things we asked him to do. Credit to him. He did the work and took advantage of every opportunity available to him. We tell kids, you have that opportunity and you have that story. Josh Jackson was an under recruited guy that made himself a consensus All American. Those stories are real and they can happen here.

There are some other schools that can go out and recruit and tell a kid, yeah, you are going to be a top five pick and a consensus All American because that’s what happens at that school. We are selling the opportunity. If the kid is made of the right stuff, he hits the ground running and who knows what can happen.

Q: With the way recruiting is today, it forces you to offer kids earlier than you did five or ten years ago. Is it tougher or harder to evaluate a kid who is a sophomore or freshman compared to an upperclassman?

BELL: Yeah it’s tough because the talent part of it isn’t tough. You can turn on the film and see that this kid is a really good football player.

But, there’s another part of it. There’s the things you can’t measure. Those intangible things that you can’t see. Those are what makes or breaks high level D1 athletes.

I had a group of kids in yesterday and I told them that I firmly believe that all D1 athlete are made when the sperm hits the egg. There’s nothing that’s going to go on after that that gets the kid from high school to a college level player. It’s about size, speed, and the mental attitude. The size and speed are really easy to see. The grit? How the kid responds to adversity? Those things you can’t tell. That’s what really sets kids apart when they get to our level. The amount of grit that they have. Their ability to respond to adversity and going through tough times because there will be tough times.

Q: Are there kids that develop that grit as juniors that maybe you don’t find out about if you look at them as a sophomore or is it there from day one?

BELL: I think it’s innate. You talk about the kids background and what they do in high school in terms of playing other sports. What the kids home life situation is. There’s a lot that goes into a kids mental makeup.

Part of our job is to go out recruiting and make sure we have all the information that we need to have to bring the right kid in here that will be the right fit and fit what we are asking them to do. We won’t compromise anything. We have a responsibility not just to the other coaches, but to the players in the locker room. We don’t want a guy to come up and say, hey this guy doesn’t fit. We don’t want that. It’s part of our responsibility as coaches to make sure that we don’t have that happen.

Q: How do you manage expectations for the defensive ends? They have done good things on the field If you have recruiting stars, but you can tell them that they aren’t that great. Is that all it takes?

BELL: Yeah. (laugh) You are coaching every day.

The thing about group is last spring we talked about the whole being greater than the sum of the parts with the entire defensive line. There’s only one really highly recruited kid in there. The rest of the guys have a story about how they came here and wanted an opportunity.

At the beginning of practice or the end of practice, you are always focusing on something. I wish I could be more positive and say that was a really good job, but I don’t want anyone to become complacent. I don’t want our kids to have a false sense of who they are.

Take Parker Hesse for example. You are a two star quarterback Waukon, Iowa that chose between Iowa, UNI, and South Dakota State. That’s not a lot to brag about.

Q: When you have the stigma outside of the area that Iowa is just cornfields and farms, how do you fight that?

BELL: I tell them my recruiting story. That’s as big as anything that I can sell. I can go outside the region because I am not from here. I can tell them my thoughts before visiting Iowa, my thoughts while I was at Iowa, and after I graduated, my reflection on Iowa.

It’s one of those things that I tell kids anything that anyone has told you about Iowa, if it’s been negative, I can guarantee you they have never been there. Is it cold? Yes. It’s the Midwest. It’s cold in Chicago. It’s the Midwest and that’s what you get. Until you take a visit, how can you really know? That’s the challenge, to get these kids here.

I feel like I am in a really good position and role to go out there, outside the region, and be able to sell my experiences here, good and bad. The most important thing that I tell them that’s unique is the guy that I am working for now, Phil Parker, in December of 1999, walked into Olive Branch High School and put me against the wall to see how tall I was. Now I work here for Phil Parker. You don’t have that story at any other college, I can guarantee you. The type of longevity that we have is unprecedented.

Q: Is it tough offer freshman and sophomores?

BELL: There’s no age limit. I try to use the same thing, if I haven’t seen the kid or he hasn’t visited here, then it’s hard to be realistic about their opportunities playing here. I try to educate kids on the process. They have no idea what an offer means. I showed some kids a national letter of intent and asked them if they had ever seen one before. No. I said, well, this never gets tweeted out. When one of these is sitting in front of you, then it’s real.

All the offers and all the really nice graphics that you are going to get on August 1st when we are able to make official offers doesn’t mean anything until you have a national letter of intent in front of you and you only get one. You can have a dozen offers, but you can only sign one national letter of intent.

Going back to the question, if a kid visits here and has genuine interest, I have no problem extending an offer. If a kid just wants to be recruited, no. I don’t want you to tweet out that you are blessed to receive and offer and have no intention of coming. You have no idea what I am trying to offer you if that’s your motive.