re: Class of 2018 Recruiting MEGATHREAD: So Long Old Friend Edition

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How Najee Harris wound up at Alabama

Harris was unleashed in the fourth quarter and wound up being the Tide’s leading rusher with 64 yards on 6 carries. Harris wore down the Bulldogs defense and was a key reason why ‘Bama drove down the field and tied the game on a pass from Tagovailoa to Calvin Ridley.

Harris had the wildest recruitment out of the group. He also happened to be the team’s longest-tenured commitment by the time he ended up signing. Alabama won this battle by identifying Harris as a potential star before many other powerhouse programs came into the mix. That work was put in by outside linebackers coach Tosh Lupoi.

Lupoi’s relationship with Harris is one of the main reasons why the highly coveted running back decided to stick with his commitment instead of flipping to Michigan at the end of his recruitment.

“Tosh believed in me when I told him about Najee as a freshman that after I was done with Joe Mixon that the next top athlete to come out of the Bay [Area] was Najee Harris,” Mori Suesue, Harris’ mentor, told SEC Country last July.

I have to say, when Harris enrolled at Alabama, I think every recruiting reporter who covered him let out a collective sigh of relief.

It wasn’t that Harris was a bad kid — he’s far from it. It was just that toward the end of his recruitment, it got very silly. I mean, it got to the point where we had to report which flight he was going to be on when he left San Antonio after the Army Bowl.

He started to like Michigan during his senior year. He took a couple of visits to Ann Arbor and Michigan reporters started to write stories about how the Wolverines staff was confident it could flip him. Fast-forward to January and Harris had a room key waiting for him and a student ID with his picture on it.

I was told in December that once Lupoi visited Harris and his mother for Alabama’s in-home visit, it was over at that point. But his recruitment got silly because Harris didn’t like talking about it and couldn’t care any less about what was written about him, and there was so much misinformation out there, mainly from the Michigan side of things. Harris didn’t help out because he declined nearly every interview during the Army Bowl week, and it was unclear what Harris was going to do when the week was over because he was an early enrollee. He was either going to fly to Birmingham or Detroit.

It was funny because during that week, Tagovailoa pretty much became Harris’ public relations rep. Everyone was asking Tagovailoa questions about Harris because the two were rooming together while there. Tagovailoa said throughout the week that he believed Harris was going to be on the same flight with him to Birmingham. It turned out Tagovailoa was right.

The two are now roommates in Tuscaloosa and will likely become the hosts of the most popular room in the city after the title game Monday night.

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Upping your post count i see, LOL.

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Nicholas Petit-Frere is taking his OV to Alabama the weekend of the 19th.

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