By Mark Pszonak
It isn’t often discussed why top recruits chose not to attend a specific school, especially more than seven years after the fact. But recently, Micah Parsons openly spoke about why he decided not to commit to Alabama, even though it was his dream school.
Micah Parsons and Derrick Henry talk about their visit to Alabama and why they couldn’t go back 😂 pic.twitter.com/BwM00zsmHZ
— B/R Gridiron (@brgridiron) April 4, 2025
“This is the God’s honest truth,” said Parsons on his Podcast, The Edge with Micah Parsons. “I went to Bama for four days, I went out there, ‘let me see what it’s like down South.’ I’m from up North. It was so hot. The workout conditions were so treacherous. I said there’s no way in hell I can survive up here.”
Parsons took his multi-day visit to Alabama during the summer of 2017. His experience eliminated the Tide from serious contention, as he didn’t even take an official visit back to Tuscaloosa later that year.
“They said, ‘come to our morning workout, we want you to see how we work.’ They must’ve thought that was going to get me,” said Parsons. “I showed up at 6am. They did 31 (reps) 10s. I said, ‘Oh my God.’ Then they did extra if you left early.”
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His tutorial on life in Tuscaloosa continued the following day.
“I said maybe it was just a hard day, you know how it is,” said Parsons. “They said come back at 6, we’ll workout again. I came back at 6 in the morning. Ya’ll did like 10 40’s in a row, you had to come in in the same timeframe. I said, dang, they really work over here. I appreciate it. I can definitely get better. But then by the weekend it was like, I don’t think I can make. It was just too much. It ain’t for me. Bama ain’t for everybody.”
Former head coach Nick Saban’s off-season workouts were always a thing of legend, which Parsons has clearly corroborated.
The former five-star obviously didn’t allow this experience to slow him down, as he enjoyed All-American seasons at Penn State and now All-Pro seasons with the Dallas Cowboys.
