Ga. Tech's David Sims gaining confidence

Instincts tell or perhaps even scream at David Sims to advance warily. The Georgia Tech B-back is spending this spring learning to ignore impulses accumulated over years of football.

Sims, who has been at the Tech offense’s featured position for 12 months, is attempting to master one of the more crucial demands of his position in coach Paul Johnson’s spread-option offense — lowering the shoulders and running full bore into the offensive line, whether he sees a hole or not.

Said Sims, “The thing I know now is, you’ve got to trust it.”

A year ago, Sims was the fourth-string B-back, having just converted from quarterback after his redshirt freshman season. He became the story of preseason practice, leapfrogging from fourth to the starting job in four weeks. As the starter, Sims played reasonably well, but failed to achieve the numbers that have come to be associated with the position.

In Johnson’s first three seasons at Tech, Jonathan Dwyer and Anthony Allen averaged 1,368.7 yards and 11 touchdowns at B-back and were named first-team All-ACC twice and once, respectively. In 12 games, Sims gained 698 yards on 135 carries with seven touchdowns. Perhaps more noteworthy was the relatively small number of long runs. Where Dwyer and Allen averaged 14.3 runs of 20 yards or more, Sims had four.

After the season, Sims looked to video for answers, looking not only at his own play, but former B-backs Preston Lyons and Allen and Dwyer. A self-confessed “film addict,” Sims has watched the Sun Bowl, a game he didn’t even play in, three times.

Sims said he also looked at “how Dwyer hit the hole and what he saw. Once he got in the open field, how many cuts did he have to make for him to get north and south? How did Anthony go through the mesh? How low Preston was because he always ran behind his pads. Just different things like that.”

What Sims saw in his runs was that, often, he took the ball from quarterback Tevin Washington thinking he didn’t have a crease to run through, when he actually did. Runs that could have pushed the pile for four or five yards or longer instead became 1- or 2-yard gains.

“Little things like that, that matters, especially for how our offense runs,” Sims said.

The trust that Sims is trying to develop is in his offensive line, in Washington’s option reads and ultimately in the scheme. In Tech’s offense, the B-back doesn’t wait for a gap to open when he receives the ball. Instead, his job is to blast through a pre-determined track, regardless of whether there’s an opening.

However, since the hole is rarely open for long, “chances are much greater of getting to the hole if you hit it full speed,” Lyons said.

“It goes against your instincts,” Lyons said. “You’ve got to trust it and practice it and bang it into your head that this is what you’ve got to do.”