Nick Saban's ridiculous claim that his player hit a young woman because he was 'scared'
Alabama football coach Nick Saban caught plenty of flack Saturday for playing Jermaine Burton, the Crimson Tide player caught on video hitting a young female fan from Tennessee in the aftermath of the Vols’ win over the Tide a week earlier.
Asked about the decision to play Burton after the game, Saban defended his player’s actions by saying he was “scared” during the altercation.
“He was scared, I was scared, some of our other players were scared,” Saban said.
It’s a statement that probably wouldn’t rattle many cages if it came from most college football coaches, but coming from the man widely regarded as one of the best — if not the single best — football coaches in the history of college football, it was stunning.
Scared? He was scared? That’s the excuse for a young man who plays a rough-and-tumble contact sport hitting a female college student in the head?
Fans rushed the field at LSU’s Tiger Stadium after the Tigers’ 45-20 win over Ole Miss on Saturday. Presumably, no player from Ole Miss was scared. At least, none of them chose to hit someone.
At Clemson, fans have a tradition of rushing the field after every home win. That happened after the Tigers’ win over Syracuse Saturday. Again, no one from the opposing team appeared to have been frightened.
It has been 24 years since fans at Neyland Stadium rushed the field after a win, but last week’s incident was hardly isolated. The last time Saban’s Alabama team lost an SEC road game where fans didn’t rush the field was 2010.
For Saban to attempt to deflect criticism by spinning this as self-defense on behalf of his player is incredible. The video speaks for itself. The girl may or may not have said something to Burton as she ran by. Either way, she side-stepped him and was clearly just running past him, and he went out of his way to reach out and hit her.
Tennessee fans call it a punch. Alabama fans call it a shove. We can play semantics all day long; ESPN’s Chris Fowler — whose self-awareness was about as low as Saban’s Saturday — said Burton “reached out with his hand and shoved” the girl … because he “felt he was endangered.” But the bottom line is that if Burton were anywhere but a football field and made physical contact with a young woman in that regard, he would be criminally charged.
Just ask Tennessee defensive back Jaylen McCollough what happens when you hit someone because you’re supposedly scared. McCollough claimed self-defense when a drunk guy mistakenly entered his apartment and wound up being knocked down a flight of steps. But because the guy exited the apartment and McCollough pursued him before punching him, McCollough faces a felony charge of aggravated assault. He has not played in the two games since his arrest.
The two cases are not the same. McCollough’s victim lost a couple of teeth; Burton’s victim is apparently none the worse for what happened on the field at Neyland Stadium. But they’re two examples of the same thing: Players venting their anger and then claiming they were scared. It doesn’t work that way, nor should it.
Every ounce of criticism being aimed at Saban in the aftermath of Saturday’s comments is deserved. Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher warned us about Saban’s narcissistic tendencies when he blew up after Saban criticized his highly-ranked recruiting class last spring.
“We build him up to be the czar of football,” Fisher said of Saban. “Go dig into his past or anybody who’s ever coached for him. You can find out anything you want to find out. What he does and how he does it. It’s despicable. It really is.”
As Fisher said at that May press conference, “I always said this, my dad always told me this, when people show you who they are, believe them. He’s showing you who he is.”
I asked after Tennessee’s 52-49 win over Alabama whether that might be the last time the 71-year-old Saban coaches against the Vols. There are some cracks showing in his facade. A man known and praised for his teams’ discipline, Saban’s 2022 Alabama squad is easily the most undisciplined team he’s ever had in Tuscaloosa. After tying a school record with 15 penalties in a narrow win over Texas earlier this year, the Tide committed 17 penalties in the loss to Tennessee.
Saban is known for his sideline blowups, but the tirades have become even more common the past couple of seasons. He suffered from one of them during the loss to Tennessee, when a player made a critical mistake on a Vols’ punt that resulted in a turnover. And again near the end of Saturday’s win over Mississippi State. He was up 30-0 at the time, but blew up after a pass interference penalty near the end of the fourth quarter that allowed the Bulldogs to break the shutout.
Suddenly, the man who has seemed to be above criticism for much of his tenure at Alabama is catching a lot of heat. And he deserves every ounce of it.
“It’s really despicable,” Fisher said in May. He was talking about Saban saying that Texas A&M “bought every player” they signed last year. He might as well have been talking about the comments Saban was going to make in October about how one of his big, burly players punched a girl in the side of the head for doing nothing more than trying to celebrate a win on the field with her fellow students. Despicable is an apt word to describe Saban’s terribly weak excuse.