'Undeniable:' Christian Kirk will attack this defining moment

This 2024 season, he's the X-factor in a loaded AFC. One moment changed his life forever, too. The Jacksonville Jaguars wide receiver will never forget how close he was to dying.

Jul 19, 2024

JACKSONVILLE — When you believe you’re about to die, time slows to an agonizing crawl. Your body careens into a parallel universe. Only those who’ve survived a near-death experience truly know the logic-defying sensation because it sticks with you the rest of your life. Doesn’t matter if the clock has barely ticked past 7 a.m. on this dog day of minicamp inside the Jacksonville Jaguars’ glistening new facility.

He isn’t groggy. His memory isn’t hazy.

Christian Kirk vividly remembers a split-second of real time dragging on for what felt like two full minutes.

He was almost 16 years old. A rising sophomore at Saguaro High School in Scottsdale, Ariz., Kirk was out fundraising with his football teammates. As they sold coupon cards full of discounts at local businesses, door to door, the weather turned nasty. A routine rainstorm revved into a torrential downpour by the time their vehicle took a left turn near Chaparral Park. Kirk was riding in the passenger seat. His teammate at the steering wheel lost control. As the vehicle began to fishtail, the driver made the grave mistake of trying to overcorrect and that’s precisely when everything — in Kirk’s world — faded into slow motion.

He looked out of his window and a light pole got closer. And closer. He asked himself one question.

“Am I going to die?”

Next, he reached peace with his mortality.

“This is it. This is how it’s going to go.”

He remembers the car hitting the curb, then the pole, and he blacked out. When Kirk finally woke up, there was glass everywhere. The car horn was blaring. In “complete shock,” he looked around the car and saw that his two friends inside the vehicle were bleeding from their heads. One of his best friends, the team’s quarterback, was driving behind them and saw the whole thing. Thankfully, he quickly called for help.

Kirk was loaded onto an ambulance, tried to talk and spit out glass.

He looked down. His bloody hands were covered in more shards of glass.

When cars wrap around light poles this badly, someone dies. Somehow, they survived.

“When can I play football again?” Kirk asked the doctor. “How long am I going to be out?”

The doctor’s somber reply, to him, felt a notch below death. He told the kid they ran some tests and believed Kirk had suffered subdural hematoma, bleeding between the brain and the skull.

They feared he suffered a small cut of the brain.

“You may not play football again,” he said.

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This is our second 2024 NFL Season Preview piece.

A decade later, it wasn’t the brain that concerned Christian Kirk.

The pain, however, wasn’t far off.

About 16.5 million people were watching this time, too.

His Jacksonville Jaguars welcomed the Cincinnati Bengals to town for a Monday Night Football game on Dec. 4, 2023. With a slew of quarterbacks landing on IR and both the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills stammering, this was the 8-3 Jaguars’ shot at an AFC ambush. KO this Joe Burrow-less club on life support, at home, and a No. 1 seed was in clear sight. Trouble, however, was brewing. All season, Kirk felt his groin get tighter, and tighter. Each time the pain down under flared up, he asked himself one question: “Am I hurt or am I injured?” Then, he played on. Through 11 games, on pace for 1,176 yards, Kirk was again cementing himself as the most misunderstood player in the NFL.

He went through warmups and everything felt fine.

Coaches designed the perfect play to get this MNF party started, too. If Cincy lined up in the coverage they expected, the Jaguars knew Kirk could shake free on a corner route as the inside man on trips left. Everything went according to plan. Kirk broke his route, turned for the ball and — reliving the night here at Jags HQ — he emphatically snaps his fingers. That’s when he heard a pop. His left adductor tore completely off the bone. He started backpedaling and falling and corralled the ball for 26 yards. Immediately, Kirk reached for a groin that finally gave. Both of his abdominals were torn, too.

Millions watching feared he quite literally busted his balls.

The newly married man sets the record straight here: Dad plans can commence.

“Those babies were all right. They were safe.”

But this was not ideal. Inside the training room, he was overcome with emotion because Kirk knew his season was finished. “And it happens,” he adds, “like that.” He could only sit and watch in severe pain as the Jaguars lost in overtime. He’s not sure what hurt more over the coming weeks — a groin torn to shreds or the fact that he was rendered powerless as the Jaguars collapsed. His absence cracked the foundation of the team itself. A preseason darling harboring Super Bowl dreams into the 2023 season — we picked ‘em— could not even join the 44 Percent Club.

Jacksonville missed the playoffs completely, losing five of its final six games. Defensive coordinator Mike Caldwell and seven of his assistants were fired. Quarterback Trevor Lawrence inked a five-year, $275 million contract and edge rusher Josh Hines-Allen inked a five-year, $150 million deal, making them the No. 1 and No. 2 highest-paid players at their positions. Even the team’s “Stadium of the Future” project was approved.

The pressure to win — now — is immense in Jag Country

All while this conference only gets richer in storylines and star power. The Kansas City Chiefs are gunning for a three-peat with Patrick Mahomes in his MJ-prime. Burrow’s back. Brandon Beane reinvented the Bills. Aaron Rodgers surely summoned the ghostly spirits of ancient pharaohs past on his trip to Egypt. The Houston Texans loaded up with Danielle Hunter, Joe Mixon, Stefon Diggs, Azeez Al-Shaair and Denico Autry. “Mr. Unlimited” swaps the Dangerwich for Primanti Bros in Pittsburgh. Derrick Henry joins Lamar Jackson. Remember Anthony Richardson? All Jim Harbaugh and his khakis do in this sport is win. Those Miami Dolphins get faster. Even Deshaun Watson drew Mahomesian hype at our site.

Yet, the forgotten player on the forgotten team who could tip the AFC on its head is the wide receiver seated right here: Christian Kirk.

Those still bloviating about his contract need to log offline and watch a Jaguars game this season. He’s the talent who can launch Lawrence into superstardom and the voice everyone will listen to in inevitable chaos. This entire franchise fishtailed into an I-95 light pole last season and spent the offseason licking its wounds.

Kirk is familiar. His life has led to this defining moment. He survived that car crash, won two more state titles and was named the best player in the state. He lit up SEC defenses on a steady diet of liver smoothies. Riiiight when it appeared his NFL career was doomed with the Arizona Cardinals — a team determined to replace him — he radically changed his day-to-day wiring. The result was a career year, a four-year, $72 million deal (worth up to $84M) and nothing but memes and mockery ‘round the football world.

The Jaguars were humbled, eh? Kirk begins this conversation with Go Long by insisting he’s been humbled his entire life.

Most recently, that month from football hell to end 2023. A torn adductor required surgery that was “invasive” and “awkward” and, like so many athletes before him, Kirk turned to pioneering core-muscle surgeon Dr. William Meyers in Philadelphia. Like Damar Hamlin, he also suffered a slapdash “mesh” procedure in college that needed cleaned up. Post-op, general movement was borderline impossible. The adductor stretches from your pelvic bone to your knee and Kirk assures we have no clue how much we use this muscle until it tears off the bone. He had zero strength in his leg. Doctors taught Kirk how to roll over and “sweep” his legs through simply to get out of bed.

This was the worst part of the injury.

A close second? Coughing or sneezing made him feel like he was getting “stabbed in the stomach.”

His fiancé (now wife) essentially became a bedside nurse. Inflammation was a problem, so she helped him drain blood. She also had a front-row seat to the anesthesia making Kirk nauseous. He vomited multiple times. Hardly a romantic getaway for these two. Meanwhile, from this hotel room in Philly, Kirk was rendered a distant TV spectator as his buddy threw three interceptions in the Jaguars’ 31-27 loss to the Cleveland Browns. Footage that killed him just as much as the knifing pain. His days became mundane: He ripped through 4 ½ to 5 hours of PT each morning, came home, slept, waited, “begged” the team’s athletic trainer to let him back in the facility to help the younger wideouts. Unfortunately, the risk of infection was still high because his wounds hadn’t fully healed.

“Not being able to be in there with them,” he says, “just ate away at me.”

He rehabbed nonstop, the Jags kept losing and the team’s playoff hopes hinged on a Week 18 finale vs. Tennessee. Kirk then begged teammates to win just one game so he could join them in the playoffs.

They lost, 28-20.

He admits players felt like they had to live up to everyone else’s expectations in 2023. Now, the 2024 season is finally here and other teams are generating hype. He even points to those Texans in the AFC South. Kirk is thrilled people are snoozing on these Jaguars. It’s nice to be dismissed again.

Nobody realizes the greatest addition in the AFC just may be the return of No. 13 in teal.

Last season’s nightmare finish crosses his mind once more.

“We’re the team that’s hovering around,” Kirk says, “We’ve got to come out swinging.”

‘I want my respect’

The fighter was forged somewhere between the “8!” and “9!” on the referee’s 10 count into the 2021 NFL season. He could see the writing on the wall. Feel it.

“The most pivotal moment of my career,” Kirk says.

Drafted by his hometown team 47th overall, his first three pro seasons were a mess. In Year 1, he broke his foot and his team went 3-13. (“It was hard. We were a bad football team.”) Two games into Year 2, a high-ankle sprain knocked him out five games. He returned. He struggled. He wasn’t close to healthy. (“I was going through a lot mentally.”) By Year 3, the Cardinals had acquired an infantry of replacements. Andy Isabella (second round), Hakeem Butler (fourth) and KeeSean Johnson (sixth) were all drafted in ‘19. They traded for DeAndre Hopkins in ‘20.

Kirk regressed. More paranoia weighed him down. Larry Fitzgerald, the legend, was his mentor. He wanted to follow his footsteps and retire a Cardinal. He couldn’t picture himself anywhere else. Yet, the Cardinals clearly didn’t like him. Drops fed more drops, fans piled on, he didn’t blame them one bit.

“I’d be pissed off, too,” Kirk says. “I had bad drops. But all of it was mental. I was thinking too much. I felt the external pressure.”

So many of his high school friends were Cardinals fans, so they’d read the backlash. Vitriol is different when its in your backyard.

Whenever Kirk screwed up, he knew exactly what was coming. It was “suffocating.”

“You know you’re going to turn on your phone,” Kirk says, “and it’s just going to be all bad. Instagram. Twitter. It’s going to be all bad.”

In came more receivers, of all shapes and sizes. Arizona signed 7-time Pro Bowler A.J. Green, drafted Rondale Moore 49th overall and — ahead of this crucial 2021 NFL season, the final year of his rookie deal — Kirk accepted the fact that his bosses didn’t want a damn thing to do with him anymore. Kirk stopped fighting something he could not control and whittled those swirling thoughts down to one decision: Either he’d take advantage of every single opportunity that comes his way in training camp or he’d fizzle out.

During camp, he played with a newfound “intensity” and caught every ball thrown his way in every drill. Not one drop comes to mind. Kirk deleted all social media, quit stressing over the front office’s disconnect from reality and turned his profession into simple combat: Me vs. You.

“I was mad!” he adds. “I was mad about the way things were going and mad that I had let it even get to that point.”

The week of Arizona’s first game against the Tennessee Titans, Kirk opened up the gameplan and… huh? Page to page, he flipped. There weren’t any plays designed for him. He was livid. Didn’t GM Steve Keim and head coach Kliff Kingsbury see what he did through camp? The only proponent for Kirk inside the building — position coach Shawn Jefferson — calmed him down. Promised Kirk that “no matter what,” he’d find a way to get him on the field and get him the ball. The former pro repeated how much he believed in him. “Trust me,” he said.

That week, Kirk caught five balls for 70 yards with two touchdowns. After the second, a man’s man of a third-and-4, back-shoulder route vs. Kevin Byard, he dismissively chucked the ball into the grass and strutted back toward the sideline. That point forward, his career took flight.

“I started to have this mentality that ‘I’m going to be undeniable,’” Kirk says. “They can’t deny me of anything that I’m doing because I’m producing. That season, I took the reins. I took every opportunity I had.”

He took this strut into every 1-on-1 matchup.

“No matter what,” Kirk says, “you should believe that you’re the best player on that field on that day. If you ooze that confidence into yourself, it’s powerful. I would play angry. And I try to channel the doubt, channel everything that has kind of gotten you to this point and recreate that fire and just go out there and play with it. Because it’s a pretty powerful thing. And I think it shuts off the thinking part.”

Instead of thinking through football, he was just “playing.” A 77-catch, 982-yard, and five-touchdown season set Kirk up beautifully for free agency.

He knew that if he played well, the narrative would change.

“And it did,” he says. “Until the new deal, and then it came back.”

Did it ever. He prefaced this whole conversation by insisting he did not want to discuss the contract, but even Christian Kirk can’t avoid the topic. When Jacksonville paid up, the reaction was hysteria. As if Uncle Sam himself reached into the pockets of everyday Americans and burnt mountains of $100 bills, cackling all the way. The uproar was not exclusive to fans. NFL peers laughed at one of their own. Typically, players love seeing players get paid — this got weird. To recap, Darius Leonard, Jalen Ramsey and Darius Slay took shots, and receivers A.J. Brown and Deebo Samuel were also stunned.

All arrows raining down those first three years was now child’s play.

Money alone doesn’t buy happiness. He admits this storm in free agency ruined the moment for himself and his family. It pissed him off that fellow players felt this way. He “saw it all” and made a point to screenshot approximately 30 tweets to store as motivation.

Says Kirk: “Who are you to tell me what I’m worth? And what I’ve been through? And what I’ve worked for? That’s not for you to decide.”

He didn’t reply to anyone and downplayed the reaction publicly.

But into the 2022 season, Kirk was back in that “undeniable” mindset.

“Because,” he says, “it was like, ‘Alright, screw you, too. I’m going to show you why I am worth this.’ And I don’t play for other people, but I am a motivated person. I want my respect.”

The Jaguars captured the AFC South, came back from 27-0 to stun the Los Angeles Chargers in the wild card round and went 10 rounds with the Kansas City Chiefs at Arrowhead in the divisional round. By every measure, Kirk earned his salary. Statistically, he had 84 receptions for 1,108 yards with eight touchdowns. Context is key. This is also a franchise that has toggled between purgatory and obscurity since its inception in 1995. Urban Meyer, the worst NFL head coach this century, drove a bad team to a new low. Fixing his mess required both hazmat suits off and a checkbook. Head coach Doug Pederson, offensive coordinator Press Taylor and the Jags were so aggressive those first 24 hours of free agency because they wanted Kirk to set a new day-to-day tone inside the building.

Before the left adductor tore off, Kirk was dealing with a tear on his right abdominal since Week 6. His groin worsened.

The Jags knew he was “hanging on by a thread,” Taylor says. But there’s no manually removing this wideout off the field. He lasted until he couldn’t move his leg and the OC has a slightly different memory of that Week 18 finale. He recalls coaches pulling the plug on the receiver because Kirk was willing to gut it out. So, what does Kirk mean to the Jaguars? Taylor wastes 0.2 seconds: “Everything.” Those defenses Jacksonville faced through the final six weeks of last season were strong, but Kirk left a black hole behind.

“It certainly took air out of our team,” Taylor says. “He’s a guy that everybody relies on. Doesn’t say a whole lot, but everybody listens to every word he says. We try to get every receiver that walks in the building to ‘Watch that guy, do what that guy does.’ Because he’s doing it the right way.”
“There’s a reason he was targeted the way we targeted him when we went after him and paid him what we paid him. I would say he's exceeded his contract at that point in time with the things he’s done and the things we expect him to do, coming back off a pretty bad injury.”

Taylor is correct. Kirk is now a bargain. This offseason, his position experienced a historic financial boom. Per Spotrac, Kirk’s deal average salary of $18 million now ranks 24th amongst all wide receivers. Agents agree that the Jaguars are getting strong bang for their buck. If anything, Kirk will be due for a raise soon. Not that facts will get in the way of feelings. When the Buffalo Bills traded Stefon Diggs to Houston — and wide receiver money took focus again — Kirk caught more flak. This time, he responded on X: “How come every time anything happens in the league I gotta catch all these strays.”

Kirk knows the average fan views him as “the overpaid guy.” Not the surgical route runner. Not the burner. All small-market teams are prey for lazy talking points. People don’t even look at the numbers.

“And it’s just like, ‘All right, what are we talking about here?’” he says.

He’s pissed, yet resolute. The NFL’s been a roller-coaster. GMs. Coaches. Players. Fans. People in every corner of the league keep humbling him and Kirk knows exactly why he responds victoriously. It’s the same reason why these 2024 Jaguars should be taken seriously.

Before screen-shotting tweets, he was picking glass out of his teeth.

“Ground Zero”

His football life began with forgery. Don’t tell anyone. When Christian Kirk was 5 years old, Dad wanted him playing tackle football with the 6- and 7-year-olds. After initially telling youth-league officials that he couldn’t find his son’s birth certificate, Evan Kirk straight up made a copy of the document and changed the date.

Son was tackling kids on the basketball court. Dad knew football would be good for him. The undersized Kirk started on the offensive line, body parts ached, he’d shed tears, his Dad barked: “You better stop crying!”

“It all calloused me,” Kirk says. “You look back at it and it all starts to make sense of why I am the way I am.”

This young, coaches gave all players a snap or two at their position of choice. The last game of his second season, Kirk said he wanted to try running back. He took his first carry 40 yards to the end zone. Kirk was rewarded a second carry, promptly rushed for a second touchdown and stayed right there at running back up to ninth grade. He studied film of two backs above all: Edgerrin James and Walter Payton. Evan was from Indiana, so they were Colts fans. And at a young age, he had Christian watch a documentary on “Sweetness,” the Bears legend. Told him to study Payton’s physicality and elusiveness. Kirk loved the fact that Payton, like him, was undersized. What he lacked in pounds, he compensated in heart. “You can feel it when you're watching him.”

His goal was to become the first freshman to ever start on Saguaro’s varsity team, and he did. Won states, too.

In came scholarship offers from UCLA and Arizona State.

“And then boom,” Kirk says. “Straight to ground zero.”

His buddy’s car torpedoed into that light pole. He took the brunt of the crash from the passenger seat and initially, yes, doctors feared subdural hematoma. Football? The doctors weren’t sure what Kirk’s life would entail. Brain damage is horrifying like that. He spent three days in ICU.

“It immediately brought me all the way down to Ground Zero,” Kirk says.

Two days later, a CAT scan and MRI revealed the hematoma was gone. Completely. Doctors told Kirk that such a hematoma typically does not disappear so quickly. He had *only* suffered a serious concussion and missed the first six games of that sophomore year. Kirk returned, won two more state titles his junior and senior years and chose Texas A&M. With 1,692 rushing yards, 1,187 receiving yards and 42 scores as a senior, he earned Gatorade Player of the Year honors. (The film’s electric.)

He needed to feel the sport slipping away to appreciate it.

His perspective on life was molded that rainy day.

“Every opportunity that I get,” he says, “I’m going to take advantage of it.”

A mentality hardened by his parents. Evan Kirk was in ROTC through high school and joined the Army. On the verge of becoming a drill sergeant, he filed for active discharge when his mother passed away. Kirk’s grandfather served in the Navy. Then, there’s his mother: Melissa. Kirk calls her “one of the hardest working women I’ve ever seen.” We’ve spent buckets of ink profiling players from broken homes who’ve harnessed their traumatic roots for good. Kirk is the first to say his home was rock solid. And he makes zero apologies.

So many lessons from childhood stick to this day in Duval County.

No. 1: “If you want something, you’ve got to work to get it.” This may sound like a parenting platitude. But, no. Evan and Melissa were quite literal with this virtue. If Kirk wanted a “Thirst Buster” at the Circle K, he’d need to throw out the trash. If he wanted to go to a friends’ house on Saturday, he was told to mow the lawn. Or pick up the dog poop. Or do the dishes. He learned — early — that nothing is given.

No. 2: You can still work and work and see zero reward. If Kirk screwed up, he was punished. If Kirk did everything right, there was no guarantee he’d receive a damn thing beyond two words: “good job.”

“As a kid you’re like, ‘Wait, hold on, I don’t get something out of this?’ But that’s life,” Kirk says. “Sometimes you do something and you aren’t rewarded. It’s just like football. I could train as hard as I want and I could do all these certain things and sometimes you’re not rewarded for it and that’s fine. You just got to keep on trucking.”

This keep-on-trucking ethic is deteriorating, he’s noticed. One social-media search is all it takes for your ego to be stroked. “All this praise, praise, praise,” says Kirk, dismayed. Praise that is being bestowed upon athletes at a fragile stage of life. Not too long ago, the NFL Draft and subsequent rookie contract was viewed as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. To him, that’s when you began to walk differently. NFL agents now scour the high school ranks for four- and five-stars. Yes men flock promising talents at age 15, age 16, the same juncture he experienced his light-pole awakening.

NIL was overdue. NIL has also become a wild west bastardizing the value of hard work.

Kirk doesn’t care if he sounds like an old man.

“You’ve got college kids that have millions of dollars acting like they are one of the highest-paid guys in the NFL, the way they move and do things,” Kirk says. “It dilutes the moment when you actually get there. Every kid has wanted to play in the NFL. And I don’t care if your vision of the NFL is cars, houses, money everywhere, or if it’s just simply going out there and playing in the NFL — it dilutes it when you can act like you've gotten there before you even gotten there. So I just think it’s just always important to remain grounded and humble and surround people around yourself that are going to keep you there.”

And lesson No. 3? Lead. Don’t be a follower. Back to age 7, when friends were goofing off before those youth practices, Dad had Christian conduct solo stretching routines. Evan told him: “You’re not one of those other kids. You’re going to be a leader.” Since then, Kirk has never stopped running his own race. This is why he was so driven to play college ball in the SEC — Kirk wanted to turn the state of Arizona into a hotbed for football talent. Once he heard College Station, Texas was a quiet area with no distractions, he chose the Aggies.

On Saturday and Sunday mornings, he wasn’t nursing hangovers. He set up cone drills. The only other teammates present were here for “punishments.” They missed a class or workout and were forced to train on an off day. Kirk enjoyed self-punishment sessions because he viewed these three years of college ball — totaling nearly 3K yards with 33 total TDs — as “strictly business.” One day, the team’s director of player development, Mikado Hinson, asked Kirk if he ever heard of boxer Andre Ward. He hadn’t. Hinson passed along videos of this light heavyweight polishing off a perfect 32-0 career record.

The highlights were fun but what stood out to Kirk most was how Ward took care of his body… right down to the liver smoothies. Ward believed the nutrient-dense protein gave him an edge.

Kirk, a “health nut,” asked the Aggies’ team nutritionist to blend liver into a smoothie.

The first glass was awful. He gagged the entire time. But glass to glass, he convinced himself there were benefits. This was never an acquired taste. Liver smoothies always tasted like chugging mud, but Kirk stuck with ‘em and genuinely believes — somehow — they helped him stay healthy throughout college. He didn’t miss one practice or one game. That’s how he’s wired. If he ever deviates from his routine, Kirk thinks it’ll bite him in the ass down the road.

Saguaro High to Texas A&M to the Arizona Cardinals to today, he keeps the memory of that crash fresh on his mind.

A memory he’s certain will help these 2024 Jacksonville Jaguars.

‘Just getting started’

This offseason, his life again changed forever in a split-second. On April 6, he said “I do.”

But first? Christian Kirk recited his own vows. Specifically, he had the vision to include one very crucial line. The savvy vet asked for clearance to golf “three times per week.”

That may seem extreme. But now that the two have been married for a few months, Ozzy has pointed out to Christian that he tends to golf more than 3x/week. Not that there’s any trouble in paradise. She allows it because she knows it helps her husband keep a clear mind. She also knows that when Kirk hits the course, there’s a good chance he’s joined by another important person in his life: his quarterback.

Eighteen holes at a time, this is how the two became so close.

“You learn a lot about somebody when you spend four hours on a golf cart,” Kirk says. “He’s awesome. He’s so mature beyond his years and I think that’s one of the areas where we connect — we’re both mellow, mature people.”

If they’re not golfing, they’re dining. Their wives are best friends, too. QB1 and WR1 have built a bond off the field that absolutely matters on it. When Kirk tells Lawrence, “I got you no matter what,” it’s heartfelt. It translates. “That trust,” Kirk adds, “in knowing we’re going to lay it all out on the line for each other.” Their knowledge of the offense and ability to decode defenses, play to play, only grows. The best QBs in the AFC have a receiver they know will get to an exact spot in clutch situations. In KC, Patrick Mahomes turns to Travis Kelce. In Cincy, Burrow has Ja’Marr Chase. Tua has Tyreek. Stroud has Nico. We’ll get to that Bills potpourri with our next season-preview piece. There’s no way to calculate such trust but Kirk “definitely” believes being so vulnerable with each other on a golf course for four hours helps those three hours on a Sunday.

Lawrence is a different QB with Kirk, too. His numbers with and without the wideout aren’t close.

Says Taylor: “To look out and say, ‘I’ve got this matchup. That’s my guy. I’m going to throw him the ball.’ Going back to Atlanta last year of just… there were so many critical third downs where Christian was the guy that we were trying to target and he makes a play for us. A huge play that we needed at that moment. He does everything right. And so your quarterback knowing I can look out there and trust this guy to be at his depth, to win versus this look, and to deliver at the moment is huge.”

More teams are shifting their traditional “X” receivers into the slot to create better matchups. The highest-paid wideout ever, Minnesota’s Justin Jefferson, lined up in the slot 23.6 percent of the time last season. Chase was in the slot for 25.8 percent of his 890 snaps. But Kirk spent 67.4 percent of his snaps inside last season, and his game is a jarring contrast to what slots have historically resembled.

“You think about slot receivers and you immediately go to guys like Wes,” he begins.

We help him fill in the gaps: Guys who look like me. (As in, Caucasian.)

Yes, the Welkers and Edelmans and Amendolas feasted underneath a defense on bubbles and choice routes, but Kirk played predominantly outside his first three pro seasons before moving inside. He never pigeonholes himself as a “slot” receiver today when he is capable of dusting DBs vertically with 4.4 speed. He’s not nickel ‘n diming. He’s able to draw mismatches and go deep. Kirk doesn’t want to pain himself a trailblazer, but believes he has shown the NFL that a 5-foot-10 receiver can run every route from this position.

Quarterbacks gain a sense of trust in receivers lined up closest to them. (That’s why Dan Fouts, Drew Bledsoe and Peyton Manning fawn over their tight ends.)

Once Kirk tore the adductor, the 2023 Jaguars were rudderless.

Weaponry isn’t a problem. Jacksonville lost Calvin Ridley in free agency, but gained Gabe Davis, rookie Brian Thomas and extended tight end Evan Engram. Lawrence’s new contract was scrutinized to Kirk extremes in the mainstream media, but a major reason why the Jaguars viewed $55,000,000 per year as a no-brainer is that they’ve seen what a healthy Lawrence and healthy Kirk can accomplish together. Neither has personality that’ll spike when pressure mounts this fall.

He doesn’t cling to his past. No way would his wife let that rancid liver smell infest their home, and Kirk politely spares his teammates at the facility. Protein can be acquired via other means. So can motivation. He deleted those 30 screenshots from his phone. When his name’s trashed again — when players chime in — he sincerely won’t care. He’ll author his own narrative, and live with the results.

As his star turn nears, however, there’s glimmers of his past.

The day of his wedding, Kirk chatted with Andre Ward on FaceTime. Mikado Hinson served as officiant.

He’s still in “undeniable” mode, exploring new ways to gain an edge: Active Release Techniques (ART), acupuncture, hyperbaric chamber, even a new 45-minute stretching routine to keep his body primed each practice. Now that training camp has begun, he’ll eat the same exact thing every day. For seven months, he’s the antithesis of a foodie. Tell him a specific meal has the right nutrients, and he’ll eat it. Enjoyment is not necessary. “I go on autopilot and keep everything the same.”

The only time Kirk misses a rep in practice is if a coach shuts him down. Even then, Taylor adds, he’s fighting to get back in that 1-on-1 line.

Says Kirk: “My career is just getting started. I’m right where I want to be.”

This season, Kirk plans to be one of the NFL’s elite wide receivers and part of the solution in Jacksonville by bringing all of his lessons and life experiences to as many teammates as possible through camp. It’s a young receivers room. Granted, August Football is also a time for sunshine and unicorns. Everyone’s hopeful. That’s why Kirk makes a point to bring up “January” and “February” — he wants this roster peaking at the perfect time. They’ve lived both realities. In 2022, the Jaguars started 3-7, Pederson gave his famed “crystal ball” speech, and they finished 7-2. In 2023, the Jaguars started 8-3, Kirk went down, and they finished 1-5. Hard times are a guarantee through the oncoming freight train of a 17-game season.

The AFC promises to be an all-time slobberknocker of a conference.

Another defining moment awaits.

“There’s going to be a lot of adversity,” Kirk says. “There always is. Through those times, it’s just trying to portray consistency and regardless of what’s thrown at us — not blinking.

“Don’t fear anything.”

Those words will mean something to teammates.

Nothing scares the man who saw his own life flash before his eyes.