Since Vols’ Head Coach Josh Heupel went outside the Tennessee “family,” and his own coaching tree, Vol fans have a lot to learn about their new running backs coach, De’Rail Sims.
I detailed Sims’ various stops and jobs up to this point, but I’ve never seen him coach nor covered a team he worked for, so there’s plenty of information that we just quite frankly don’t have.
With that said, I DM’d Bearcats’ 247 writer Keegan Nickoson to get more information on Sims from somebody who’s covered him for the past two seasons. Many thanks to Keegan for taking his time to answer my questions.
1) At 38, Sims is still relatively young when it comes to coaches. But he’s spent the last four seasons with Scott Satterfield — three at Louisville and the last year at Cincinnati. Sims didn’t join Satterfield at Louisville until 2021 and spent Satterfield’s final two season there until Satterfield took the Cincinnati job and took Sims with him. What, if anything, can you tell me about what drew Satterfield to Sims when he hired him at Louisville, and what factors came into play when Satterfield brought Sims with him to Cincinnati?
Running back coaches are often looked at to be sorta the heavy lifters on recruiting trails. Sims doesn’t seem to have much of a track record there, at least according to the sometimes accurate and sometimes not list of signees from 247’s list. Would you attribute that to lack of resources at former stops? I know Vol fans were leery of former RB coach Jerry Mack’s recruiting when he was hired, but Mack is a Tennessee native and had already been an offensive coordinator three times and an associate head coach when he was hired here, while Sims doesn’t have quite that sort of track record.
