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.

”I can’t tell you how many text messages I got from coaches throughout the league,” he said. “You feel that brotherhood, that fraternity, which is what’s special about coaching and playing in this league. We’re all in this together. But yeah, the grieving part of that, that’s still ongoing.”