Jeremy Bell’s First Georgia Touchdown Carries Deeper Meaning

ATHENS — Jeremy Bell had every reason to stay away from the football field last Saturday.

Instead, the Georgia junior returned to Athens following the passing of his brother, Elijah Tiller, a U.S. Army specialist, and went back to work.

Bell’s reward came early in the fourth quarter against Tennessee State, when he hauled in a 54-yard touchdown pass from redshirt freshman Ryan Montgomery for the first touchdown of his Georgia career.

It was a big play for a receiver who had spent the past few years patiently waiting for his opportunity.

But given everything Bell had dealt with in the days leading up to it, the play meant something more.

“He just lost his brother within the last week,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart said after the game. “He had to go home for a funeral, bury his brother, and take care of his family. He’s been dealing with extreme emotions.”

Smart said he didn’t even want Bell to practice, but the Homerville, Georgia, native wanted to.

And then he played.

“He’s a really talented player,” Smart said. “He’s been developing for a couple of years now, and he’s starting to come into his own.”

‘He just was hungry to compete’

Long before Bell was catching touchdowns at Sanford Stadium, he was a multi-sport athlete in Homerville, a small town in South Georgia near the Florida line.

Don Tison coached Bell throughout his four years at Clinch County and saw the development firsthand.

Bell was talented when he was young, Tison said, but he wasn’t necessarily the type of player who immediately stood out as a future Division I prospect.

What set him apart was what happened once he started finding success.

“He just was hungry to compete all the time,” Tison said.

Bell played football and basketball and competed in track and field. He averaged 15.2 points and 7.3 rebounds as a sophomore on the basketball court and won a Class A Division II state championship in the 400-meter dash as a junior with a personal-best time of 50.70 seconds.

On the football field, his development accelerated.

Bell caught 31 passes for 742 yards and 10 touchdowns as a junior in 2022 before totaling 1,357 yards of offense and 20 scores the following season.

But Tison said the biggest change wasn’t necessarily reflected in the box score.

It was Bell’s approach.

Around the end of his 10th-grade year, Bell began taking the weight room more seriously. Once he saw the results, Tison said, Bell became even more committed to developing himself.

“He really started working hard in the weight room and developing himself,” Tison said. “And then he just really took off after he did that.”

Bell’s junior season was his breakout year. His senior season, however, presented a completely different challenge.

‘He could have left. He stayed.’

Clinch County lost its quarterback for the season, leaving the team without someone capable of consistently getting Bell the football.

At the time, Bell didn’t have any college offers.

Tison said it would have been easy for Bell to look elsewhere.

Instead, he stayed at Clinch County. The Panthers changed his role, using him more as a running back while still moving him around at receiver.

The move made Bell a more physical player, Tison said, but it also revealed something deeper about him.

“He didn’t use circumstances to make some kind of move or run away from a challenge,” Tison said. “He stuck right there with us and really showed people kind of what he was made of.”

That development eventually caught Georgia’s attention.

Bell committed to Indiana before the Bulldogs flipped him late in the recruiting process.

Since arriving in Athens, he has continued to follow the same path that got him there: work, patience and development.

Smart said Tuesday that Bell was the type of player Georgia wanted to find in its own backyard.

“He’s a tremendous athlete,” Smart said. “He’s from a very rural area, and we’ve had several players from this school who have relationships there with coaches, so they reached out to us, and we pursued it.”

Smart also acknowledged that Bell came from a high school offense that didn’t necessarily prepare him for the demands of playing wide receiver at a major college program.

“He was not fortunate enough to play in some elaborate passing-scheme offense,” Smart said. “He worked really hard at what he did.”

Bell has spent the past few seasons honing those skills in Athens.

‘One of the highest-character kids’

Tison said that patience is part of what makes Bell who he is.

Even after arriving at Georgia, Bell could have transferred to another program where he might have had a quicker path to playing time.

He didn’t.

“He wanted to stay with Georgia because Georgia is the team that gave him his chance,” Tison said.

That decision, Tison believes, says as much about Bell as anything he did on the football field.

“He has a great deal of loyalty,” Tison said. “He’s a very loyal person.”

Saturday’s touchdown carried even more weight for Tison. He wasn’t at Sanford Stadium. He was on Lake Blackshear, following the game and keeping up with Bell’s statistics.

Later, he stopped at a restaurant with friends, where the game was playing on television.

They had barely been there five minutes when Bell got involved.

First came a jet sweep.

Then came the touchdown.

Tison watched his former player race 54 yards into the end zone.

“Just knowing where he’s come from, from a young age, developing and going through the challenges that he’s faced and the circumstances that he’s overcome, and the fact that he’s just working so hard and he’s such a good person,” Tison said, “it was probably one of the proudest moments that I’ve had as a coach, watching a former player.”

A brother who was always there

Bell’s brother, Elijah Tiller, was two years older than him and also a Clinch County graduate.

The two brothers were close, Tison said. When Jeremy was a sophomore and Elijah was a senior at Clinch County, Tison remembers Elijah being something of a protector for his younger brother.

Elijah graduated from Clinch County in 2022 and enlisted in the U.S. Army the following year, beginning a new chapter of his life at Fort Campbell near Clarksville, Tennessee.

His death left Bell facing a level of adversity no football game could erase.

Georgia tight end Elyiss Williams said the team knew about the loss before Saturday’s game and tried to support Bell in whatever way it could.

“We all tried to reassure him,” Williams said. “He works his butt off every day, and just seeing him score on Saturday, it was a great day to see.”

Williams, who is from nearby Folkston, Georgia, has known Bell for years, dating back to when Williams was an eighth grader playing junior varsity football, and Bell was already making an impression.

“I’ve been going against Jeremy for a long time,” Williams said. “Just seeing him every year, just become a dude.”

For Tison, though, Bell’s response to the loss wasn’t surprising.

It was simply another example of the character he had seen from him for years.

Tison said it can be difficult to explain to people what it really means when a coach describes a player as being “high character.”

With Bell, he said, the phrase doesn’t begin to cover it.

“He is one of the highest-character kids I have ever been around,” Tison said.

Bell returned from his brother’s funeral. He practiced despite Smart’s reluctance to put him through it. Then, when Saturday arrived, he stepped onto the field and waited for his opportunity.

When it came, he made the most of it.

And for Tison, there was a deeper meaning behind Bell’s decision to keep going.

“I know Jeremy; the way he’s going about it and thinking about it, that’s what his brother would want him to do,” Tison said.