D.J. Fluker writes about recruiting process, decision to pick Alabama

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I took a visit to Mississippi State and I didn’t really like it. Too much cowbell for me, you know? It didn’t feel right. I visited Auburn, and it was really nice, but in the end I just didn’t think it was the place for me. Then I visited LSU — just an hour and a half drive from where I grew up — and it was pretty good. The recruiting coach did a great job, too. I got the whole 5-star treatment.

I grew up an LSU fan because I lived in New Orleans. It’s all-LSU everywhere in NOLA, so you don’t have much of a choice. I remember Nick Saban being at LSU in 2003 when they won the BCS National Championship. They had a great team, but when he left, they just weren’t the same. Even though Les Miles is a great coach (he won a BCS title at LSU, too), they didn’t have that same fire they had under Saban.

But the second I stepped on the campus at Alabama, I thought, “This might be my last stop.”

God’s honest truth: When I visited Alabama, I didn’t even know who Bear Bryant was. I didn’t really follow college football. LSU was all I really knew. So when I visited Alabama, there was all this talk about tradition, and I didn’t know anything about it.

Then they took me to the campus museum and I saw all these great players from Alabama — the Shaun Alexanders, the Ozzie Newsomes — and all that history just unraveling before my eyes. I’m thinking, “Man, I wanna be a part of that. I gotta play here.”

I went to a game in Tuscaloosa to experience what it would be like to be a part of that team and that history, and they did it up. I ran out of that tunnel with the team —against LSU, no less — and it was electrifying. Fans were screaming, my name was up on the jumbotron, it was crazy. I felt like I was a part of something bigger than a football team, like I made it to the NFL already. The whole stadium had an attitude about it. Everyone had a swagger. I felt like it was my time.

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