Horrible rumor going around today re: Khyree Jackson

[purplefaithful]

Ben Goessling
@BenGoessling
The #Vikings plan to pay out the remainder of Khyree Jackson’s signing bonus to his estate.

Players will wear helmet decals, and coaches will wear pins, with the initials ‘KJ’ throughout the season. Jackson’s number 31 will go unused.

Solid move by the Vikings...

[purplefaithful]

Heartbroken Vikings will honor rookie Khyree Jackson all season

Players will wear helmet patches with cornerback Khyree Jackson's initials, and his No. 31 and locker will go unused after his death in car accident on July 6.

The first full day of training camp for VIkings rookies was supposed to be an early milestone in Khyree Jackson's career. On Monday, as General Manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and coach Kevin O'Connell discussed plans to honor the cornerback through the 2024 season, Jackson was there only in memory.

Jackson was killed along with two of his high school teammates in a three-car crash on July 6 in Maryland, his home state. The Vikings announced that players will wear helmet decals, and coaches will wear lapel pins, with Jackson's initials throughout the 2024 season. The team will also give Jackson's $827,148 signing bonus to his estate, and cover more than $20,000 of Jackson's family's expenses for the funeral on Friday to remember Jackson and Isaiah Hazel, his friend who was also killed in the crash.

Adofo-Mensah, O'Connell, defensive coordinator Brian Flores, special teams coordinator Matt Daniels and defensive backs coach Daronte Jones will attend the service, and the Vikings plan to fly Jackson's family to Minnesota for a private celebration of life service with the team. Jackson's No. 31 and his locker will go unused in the team's practice facility all season, and the team plans to put a design on its practice fields to honor Jackson.

"It's a tragedy that he's not here," Adofo-Mensah said at the Vikings' first news conference since Jackson's death. "I want to pass my condolences to his family, the Hazel family and the [A.J.] Lytton family, as well."

Adofo-Mensah and O'Connell praised the team's owners, the Wilf family, for how they handled the situation.

"We have great ownership here," Adofo-Mensah said. "It's never a question of details or anything like that. It's always, 'What's the decent thing? What's the human thing? What's the right thing to do?' That's the question [the Wilfs] always ask myself, [senior VP of football operations] Rob [Brzezinski] and Kevin in these environments."

Jackson's death cut short a football journey that captivated the Vikings before they selected him 108th overall this spring. He had quit football, working at a Harris Teeter grocery store and Chipotle in Maryland, before returning to college and eventually developing enough to play at Alabama and Oregon.

Adofo-Mensah remembered watching Jackson doing one-on-one drills against a receiver at the Senior Bowl — "He had a penchant for commentary, let's say," the GM said — and recalled their conversation in his office before the draft about why Jackson's favorite song (by hip-hop artist Major Nine) mattered to him.

"He said, 'Kwes, there's no wishes in this life. You get out of life what you put into it,'" Adofo-Mensah recalled. "His joy, the way he attacked life, and that hard-working spirit were why we were so excited to add him to this building."

The news of Jackson's death reached O'Connell through a 4 a.m. phone call while he was on the West Coast during Fourth of July weekend.

"It's the call, as a head coach, we all fear more than anything," O'Connell said. "To get that phone call and know, not only Khyree but two other lives were lost, all young adults gone way, way too early, it just leaves you heartbroken."

The Vikings quickly tried to connect players with grief support resources; O'Connell learned through summer phone calls how many teammates already felt close to Jackson because of his convivial spirit. Other NFL coaches, O'Connell said, called to offer their condolences.

"A lot of times, you become really close to these guys," he said. "They become almost like kids of your own. You worry about them. So there's no playbook, no way to go about it [as a coach]. But I do think it's my responsibility to make sure that all of his teammates, as well as his family and the people who were closest to him, know how much I cared for him, and how much we all care for each other."

Thirty-eight players, including rookies, quarterbacks, players recovering from injury and several other veterans, had reported for Vikings training camp by Monday morning, with the remainder of the roster due to report on Tuesday. O'Connell said he ordinarily waits until the full team has arrived to address the group, but in light of Jackson's death, he pulled the Vikings' early reporters together after their conditioning test to talk.

"I just made sure they're aware of the resources we have to help, and just let them know how I was feeling, where I'm at," O'Connell said. "It's OK to feel however they're feeling."

One of the ways Jackson's death might reverberate is as a reminder.

"I think it's a wake-up call, in a lot of ways, that we're not guaranteed another day on this earth at any point in time," O'Connell said. "There's not one player in that locker room that probably didn't think about, 'Could that have been me?' So I don't know if one thing correlates to the other, but I would say, the gift we get every single day to be part of this organization, my message is going to be, 'I'm not going to take a single day I have with you guys for granted.' You hate that moments like this are what make you have that point hammered home: just how fortunate we are to get the opportunities that we do."


https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-vi...600382955/

[MAD GAINZ]

That really says a lot about the Wilfs as people to go above and beyond like that for Khyree and his family. I don't think all the owners in the NFL would do what they did.

[medaille]

Solid move by the Vikings...

Are they legally allowed to not pay him that money?

[purplefaithful]

Drawn to Khyree Jackson's grit, Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores works through his grief at training camp

The detours on Khyree Jackson's path to the NFL — the community college he left, the hourly jobs he worked while thinking he was done with football — became the details of his story that resonated with Brian Flores so deeply this spring.

From their first meeting at the Senior Bowl to their pre-draft Zoom calls and Jackson's visit to Minnesota in April, Flores was drawn to Jackson's grit, believing it could become the substance of a successful NFL career.

Nearly three weeks after Jackson's death in a July 6 car accident, the Vikings defensive coordinator is still working through grief.

"Speaking for myself, I have my moments where I get down," Flores said. "You think about all that he had been through to get to this point — you know, that's a lot of what I loved about the player. I think there's a lot of adversity that goes on for three and a half hours on Sundays that we all love to watch. I think part of my process in evaluating players is: How are they going to deal with adversity? Where are they going to pull it from? I think each one of us individually, whenever we're going through something, we think about the times we overcame something else, and it could have nothing to do with football. But he certainly had some things in his life that I thought were going to propel him to doing some great things."

Flores, Vikings General Manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, coach Kevin O'Connell, special teams coordinator Matt Daniels and defensive backs coach Daronte Jones will be part of the Vikings' contingent flying to Maryland on Friday for Jackson's joint funeral service with Isaiah Hazel, his high school teammate who died along with Jackson and Anthony (A.J.) Lytton Jr., in the July 6 crash. Rookie linebacker Dallas Turner, who played with Jackson at Alabama, will also make the trip to Maryland. The Vikings will cover more than $20,000 of Jackson's family's costs for the service, and pay the remainder of Jackson's $827,148 signing bonus to his estate.

"He helped me realize who I was. He helped me build my confidence," said Turner, who kneels at a tribute to Jackson on the edge of the field before and after each practice. "He was definitely a very impactful person. He was never too big to talk to anybody, never too big to give advice to anybody. He was a genuine dude, so it was tough, for sure. [When I heard the news], I didn't want to believe it. It took me a week or two to believe it."

The Vikings' contingent is scheduled to be back from the funeral by Friday night, and at that point, Flores will return to evaluating a secondary that will continue to demand his and Jones' attention. Second-year cornerback Mekhi Blackmon, a player for whom Flores was holding high hopes this season, tore an ACL on the first day of training camp practice Wednesday, further testing the depth of a unit that came into camp with questions.

The Vikings signed cornerback Jacobi Francis after placing Blackmon on injured reserve Thursday, and O'Connell said the team is working through options in the secondary while assessing the depth on their roster. But Blackmon, the first cornerback the Vikings drafted after hiring Flores last year, seemed to be in position to improve in his second season.

"Mekhi is a fierce competitor. He's very talented. He's exactly what we're looking for in a Viking," Flores said. "It's a tough loss. We all feel it. But he's got a great support system, and we're part of that. It's tough because he put a lot into it. For it all to be taken away, just like that, it puts things in perspective. It's tough for us, but I'm thinking about him. He'll bounce back."

The impact they both have on the 2024 Vikings roster is the only sense in which Blackmon's injury and Jackson's death could be connected. One is a harsh fact of life in a normal football season; the other carries a cruelty that feels anything but normal.

Flores thought back to Kendrick Norton, the Dolphins defensive tackle whose left arm had to be amputated after a July 2019 car accident while Flores was the head coach in Miami. "It puts things in perspective," he said.

What's sustained him through Jackson's death, Flores said, is the support he's felt from coaches across the NFL.

https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-vi...600386157/

[purplefaithful]

A mos now to investigate...

Anyone else surprised there has been nothing else since the crash? Just a few early allegations.