Marcus Freeman shares hilarious story about Sauce Gardner

Marcus Freeman got to know Ahmad “Sauce” Gardner well at Cincinnati when he was the defensive coordinator. Ahead of the 2022 NFL Draft, the current Notre Dame head coach shared some hilarious stories about Gardner’s first season with the Bearcats.

As it turns out, it took Freeman a while to get used to calling Gardner “Sauce” and joked it would take a lot for him to call him that. Well, he made it happen with a big performance in a game.

“He comes to fall camp, and I remember he walked around and said, ‘Hey, my name’s Sauce,'” Freeman said on The Rich Eisen Show. “And I remember saying in the first defensive unit meeting, ‘I will never call another man Sauce until you give me a reason to call you Sauce, alright?’ You see him making plays through fall camp like OK, this guy’s pretty good. You play him just a little bit during the start of the year, he’s rotating in.

“I’ll never forget, it was the game vs. UCF and he picks the ball off, runs a pick-six, the crowd goes crazy and I run up to him on the sideline and said, ‘You are now Sauce for the rest of your career. You are officially Sauce.’ From that moment, he was known as Sauce to me.”

Marcus Freeman on recruiting Sauce Gardner: ‘Every time we talked to him, he didn’t have a shirt on’

Freeman was one of the main recruiters as Cincinnati made a run at Gardner, who was a three-star recruit from the Class of 2019. As it turns out, he made some interesting fashion choices during his calls with the coaching staff.

“I remember the first time he came to Cincinnati,” Freeman said. “First of all, I remember recruiting him. Coach [Mike] Mickens, who’s our corners coach here at Notre Dame, was the one recruiting him. Every time we talked to him, he didn’t have a shirt on. We’d FaceTime him, and I’m like, ‘If we FaceTime this guy one more time and he doesn’t have a shirt on, we’re going to drop it.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know about this guy, Coach Mick.'”

It worked out well, though. Gardner went on to dominate in his three years with the Bearcats, 68 tackles, 5.5 tackles for loss and nine interceptions during that time. He’s a virtual consensus first-round draft pick, and he’ll wait to find out where he’ll go in the draft Thursday night in Las Vegas.