Donovan Jackson’s willingness to play out of position gets high marks from the Vikings

One game after Ohio State left tackle Josh Simmons tore the patellar tendon in his left knee, the school lost backup Zen Michalski to a lower-body injury against Nebraska. It led Buckeyes coach Ryan Day and offensive line coach Justin Frye to an audacious idea: Approaching Donovan Jackson, their 6-foot-4 senior who’d started 31 games at left guard, about a move to left tackle.

The request came with a hard deadline, too: Jackson would have to be ready in time to face Abdul Carter, the Penn State pass rusher who would become the third overall pick in the NFL draft, in a pivotal game the next Saturday.

“I was kind of like, ‘You serious?’ ” Jackson, 22, recalled. “At that point. I’d only played guard; I think I didn’t even practice [tackle]. And so when they told me, I was like, ‘You guys have to be joking.’ And Coach Day didn’t smile. I kind of figured, ‘Oh, wow, he actually is serious.’ ”

The coaches left the decision in Jackson’s hands after a discussion about how the ups and downs of the switch might affect his draft status. He said he ”kind of wrestled with it” for a day, and after phone calls with his agent and his parents, Jackson came back to the Buckeyes coaches with an answer: He would do it.

”I believed that with me moving to tackle, we would have greater success than, say, putting a guy who didn’t have a whole lot of [starting] experience,” Jackson said. “So of course, there was a little bit of learning curve. Had to drop that leg back a little bit, be able to set in space. But my dad taught me from a young age, ‘If you’re going to do anything, you better do the best of your ability, because one, I’m paying for it. And two, you carry the Jackson name on your back, and that means that name carries not only yourself, but all those who came before you.’

“So I just switched my mindset of being a guard to tackle. I had to tell myself, ‘No, you’re a tackle.’ I couldn’t give myself that excuse mentally. I mean, just really anything to help the team win.”

Jackson left the Penn State game with a few plays ”I wish I could have gotten back,” but the Buckeyes left with a 20-13 win that helped them reach the College Football Playoff even after a loss to Michigan at the end of the regular season. With Jackson starting four playoff games at left tackle, Ohio State won its first national championship in a decade.

The move, in a sense, might have helped his draft stock. It made an impression on the Vikings, the team Jackson told his agent he hoped would draft him after his predraft visit to Minnesota. On Thursday night after they picked Jackson 24th overall, and on Friday afternoon as they introduced him to reporters, the position switch might have been the thing they talked about most.

“We say the word ‘selfless’ often, and I think it’s a word we all like to say about ourselves,” Vikings General Manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah said Friday. “But selflessness in action, you’re talking about everything on the line for his personal future. What he did for his team, [which] resulted in a national championship run, is something that he should be proud of as a player, and something that we’re proud to bring to this organization.”

The Vikings are still bringing left tackle Christian Darrisaw back from a torn ACL, and Jackson said Friday he’d be willing to play the position again if he was asked. But in reality, the move said more to the Vikings about his character than about any versatility they might need to tap in an emergency.

Jackson will likely get the chance to win the left guard job, completing an interior line redesign that started with free agent center Ryan Kelly and right guard Will Fries, and the Vikings hope he’ll become a fixture of an offensive line they can keep together for years.

Chip Kelly, who hired O’Connell in San Francisco in 2016 and nearly brought him to UCLA to be the offensive coordinator in 2018, was Jackson’s offensive coordinator last year at Ohio State. He returned to the NFL as the Raiders’ offensive coordinator this year, meaning he was “a little tight-lipped” with O’Connell about Jackson before the draft. But O’Connell’s familiarity with Kelly’s scheme gave him the context to evaluate Jackson’s play in 2024.

Jackson thrived as a run blocker on both zone and gap scheme plays, and the versatility should help him in Minnesota, where the Vikings have added power runs to complement their customary zone scheme. The work he did against Carter, too, made an impression on O’Connell about how Jackson would fare in pass protection.

“I just think it speaks about who he is, his makeup,” O’Connell said. “And then, he’s a big, strong guy with length.”

As Jackson recalled Friday, his high school coach in Houston was “pounding the table” for him to visit the Gophers. He picked Ohio State instead, and “I think it worked out,” Jackson said.

After a predraft visit to Minnesota, though, Jackson said he called his agent to say the state he’d turned down for college was the place he wanted to start his pro career.

“I understand it’s not like college; you can’t commit to an organization,” he said. “But I told my agent, ‘If we can, I really want to go to Minnesota.’ ”

He’ll get his chance to return to the position he’s played most of his career, in part because of the impression he made on the Vikings when he left that position last fall.

“The beauty of football is that the game is never stagnant,” Jackson said. “You always have to grow. You always have to improve in what you’re doing. So all aspects of my game, I want to prove in there’s not one point where I’m satisfied or content of what I’m doing on the football field.”

To get exclusive analysis by Ben Goessling on the Vikings in your inbox, sign up for the free Access Vikings newsletter. Email your Vikings questions to accessvikings@startribune.com.