Meet Vonn Bell: the young, talented, confident and fearless safety who leads Ohio State’s vastly improved defensive secondary, which has gone from the team’s soft underbelly to an up-and-coming unit.
Bell, a sophomore from Chattanooga, is the walking embodiment of such a transformation.
To best illustrate this, before each game, Bell promises his position coach and co-defensive coordinator, Chris Ash, he will make an interception. And if he does so, he earns a homemade cupcake.
“We just kept that deal going,” he said.
Bell added: “If you don’t make no plays, you just get little cupcakes,” he said.
“But I get the big cupcakes, every game.”
After all, Bell leads the fourth-ranked Buckeyes with six interceptions, which he loves so much that he calls them “money balls.” With the National Championship against Oregon approaching, he yearns for plays like these.
“It’s just having a knack for the ball,” he said. “I always wanted to be a ballhawk and always wanted to make plays for this defense.”
There’s a correlation between the size of Bell’s cupcakes and the success of a defense that, according to head coach Urban Meyer, was “abysmal” before and during a disheartening postseason collapse last year.
The pass defense was ranked 112th nationally last season. This year, it’s the country’s 16th-best outfit, giving up less than 200 yards a game.
Players like Bell, a prized recruit who defected from his southern roots to come north to Columbus and play for Meyer’s Buckeyes, are here to ensure such a humiliating drop off doesn’t happen again.
“We want to make a point, really. We just started a new trend,” he said. “Last year’s group, saying we didn’t have enough to get the job done because we were the weakest link on our team because our offense was putting up so many points and we were giving up so much. This class, we just came together in the offseason training and just stepped up and said enough is enough. Silver Bullets defense back.”
Bell could’ve gone to Alabama, Tennessee, or Georgia, but Meyer, who won two national titles at Florida, promised him he’d do the same at Ohio State.
And on Monday night, the two will have the chance to turn an old recruiting pitch into reality.
“I knew Coach Meyer was going to bring championships,” he said. “Every two years in his program, he brings championships. He’ll always be in the big games, that’s what I wanted.”
And Bell, the cupcake aficionado, hopes he can add at least another moneyball to his collection in the process.
“You’re going to see me hollering it,” he said.
“I hope you’re on the sideline.”
