Introducing Quinton Bell, the Raiders rookie who 'stumped the truck'
It was during one of the Oakland Raiders' top 30 visits when Quinton Bell, the unknown physical specimen from Prairie View A&M, took his place at the dinner table.
There was Clelin Ferrell, chopping it up with Montez Sweat. Along with Christian Wilkins, breaking bread with Devin White and Chauncey Gardner-Johnson. The elite defensive draft prospects were gathered together at a Bay Area Italian restaurant, having each received one of the coveted 30 invites allocated to the Raiders by the NFL each season. And there with them was Bell, a combine snub who had been playing defensive end for all of one college football season. At an FCS school.
Meet Bell, the Raiders' ninth and final draft pick of 2019, a seventh-round selection who, as an edge rusher, checks a box at a position of need after the Raiders had a league-low 13 sacks last season. But unlike Ferrell, the first-rounder whose selection at No. 4 overall raised more than a few hackles, Bell barely registered a blip at No. 230 overall. In fact, first-year Raiders general manager Mike Mayock, a longtime NFL Network draft analyst, "stumped the truck" as the league's station had no highlights of Bell to show when Mayock pulled Bell's card.cheap nfl jerseys china nike
Maybe that's because Bell, a high school track star in Long Beach, California, made the unconventional switch from receiver to defensive end as a Prairie View senior. Was Mayock trolling his former employers and perhaps every analyst who was sure the Raiders would draft a quarterback (Bell's initials, after all, are QB)? Mayock insists Bell is a legitimate prospect. So legit, the Raiders feared word would get out that he was on that visit with Ferrell & Co. The Raiders worried some other team would keep Oakland from signing him as an undrafted rookie after all of the leg work done by Raiders scout Teddy Atlas III. So Oakland took him in the seventh round.cheap nike nfl jerseys wholesale
"He kind of kept this guy alive in my mind, and that's what good scouts do," Mayock said of Atlas. "At first I was like, 'I've got to hear about a wide receiver converted to defensive end, and he's from a small school? Come on, Teddy.'
"He kept bringing him up and he kept bringing him up and he said, 'Mike, he's 240 pounds.' I was like, 'Wait a minute, he was 222 or 225 during his [season].' He said, '240, and he ran a 4.4.' That got my attention."
Enough for Oakland to attend his Pro Day, where he flashed that receiver speed and that edge rusher burst. Besides running that 4.48-second 40-time, which would have been tied for the 10th-fastest time at the combine, he had a vertical jump of 41.5 inches, which would have been tied for sixth-best in Indianapolis. Bell also benched 225 pounds 23 times and cleared the 12-foot-long tape on the broad jump, but fell backward to scratch, before registering an 11-4.
After catching a combined 19 passes for 259 yards and one touchdown his first three seasons, a new coaching staff at Prairie View saw something different in the 6-feet-4 athletic freak. So much so that incoming defensive line coach Todd Middleton pulled Bell, a rising senior, aside before spring practice began.
