Now that the famed Alabama football coach Nick Saban has retired, the stories about the pigskin boss are starting to emerge. A new one describes how when the choice between stopping for the cops or bailing on them yielded an epic bail because, in Alabama, Saban is boss.
Former running back Bo Scarbrough played for Alabama for three years, winning two national championships with Saban in 2015 and 2017. He ran for 1,512 yards and 20 touchdowns on 267 carries in 31 career games. Scarbrough told a steely-eyed Saban story that involved a Mercedes, a determined coach, and a broken speed limit.
Scarbrough, Saban, associate athletic director of sports medicine Jeff Allen, and athletic relations coordinator Cedric Burns were driving home from a golf tournament in Birmingham, Alabama. While Burns was driving, he decided to let the engine on Saban’s Mercedes S550 rip.
“We had hit about 50 speed limit, so we hit it. You know me, I’m from the hood,” Scarbrough said on The Bama Standard Network this week. “So we speed, and I like that type of stuff. So Jeff’s like, ‘Ced, slow down.’ Coach Saban’s on the phone at the time and Ced didn’t say nothing. So I looked at Jeff, and Jeff looked at me, and he said, ‘Ced, slow down.’”
“Next thing you know, we zoomed past the police. I’m talking about like we’re going 90.”
At this point, the police pull behind with their lights flashing. It was then that Scarbrough realized that his coach was a savage.
“(Burns) calls somebody and then hung up the phone and they still was behind us,” Scarbrough continued. “Jeff was like, ‘Ced, you ain’t gonna stop?’”
“Coach Saban turned around and said, “‘Jeff, we’re not stopping.’ We just kept going. Police just backed up off us.”
If this is the first crazy story in a career of milestones, one can only hope for the Nick Saban roast in the future. In the state of Alabama, it is clear that Nick Saban got it like that, and if this story is true, he is the anti-hero the sports world needs.
