Hurricane Dayo season begins in mid-August.

It’s the heart of training camp, which this year means a visit from the Bears and coach Matt Eberflus, the defensive coordinator from Dayo Odeyingbo’s rookie year, back when the Colts' explosive pass rusher was only an idea. It’s a night practice, but the temperatures are sticky. Dayo feels the sweat each time this Bears guard wants to hold his soaked jersey.

Dayo’s blood pressure starts to rise. The Bears are running on the Colts, and Dayo can’t break free to stop it. It’s the first NFL training camp for this son of Nigerian immigrants, and he finally feels healthy enough to dominate, but he can’t.

He gives a pleading look to Eberflus, but all his former coach does is shrug.

The next snap, the Colts called for a stunt, and Dayo went inside before peeling back outside so fast the guard couldn’t even touch him, and he exploded into P.J. Walker and knocked the Bears quarterback to the ground.

“You don’t want to hurt guys," defensive line coach Nate Ollie said, "but you don’t want to pull that away from him."

This is the time of year when these storms take shape. Along the Atlantic Ocean, rising water temperatures create moist air that thunderstorms suck into the sky. Those winds follow a ring around the eye. They can reach speeds of up to 155 miles per hour, powerful enough to throw sheets of the ocean for 100 miles across land.

Ollie and the Colts coaches have spent the past two seasons trying to pull Dayo's manic side out. They've been searching for the power, speed and combined force they hoped they were drafting in a 6-foot-5, 271-pound player with 35-inch arms. The Colts took him in the second round in 2021, back when Dayo had a ruptured Achilles.

This summer day against the Bears was a flash. It was as if Ollie could hear the storm sirens blaring.

“He just goes dark,” Ollie said. “It’s hard to explain. We just see it.”

They want to see it more. But darkness is a rare state for a man who was brought to this country to be everything but.

Joy arrives

This storm was never supposed to form on a football field.

When Betty and Gary Odeyingbo immigrated from England to the United States in the late 1990s, the purpose was to chase a more prosperous life. This was their second such migration, after both did so from Nigeria to England as young adults.

The latest step was to New York to start a family. They had one son named Dare, and they wanted to name the other based on the blessings they were feeling in their lives.

So they named him Dayo, which means joy arrives.

“His spirit is part of the ones who came before him,” his father, Gary Odeyingbo, said. “What happens to him is the joy for everyone.

“The ultimate outcome of the family unit is the internal joy.”

And that’s what Dayo was as he grew into a boy who could run faster than all of the kids his age. The family moved to Louisville and then to the Dallas suburbs when he was young. He loved the outdoors, disappearing until the sun went down. He always wanted to go fishing and camping.

He begged his mother, Betty Odeyingbo, to let him join Boy Scouts, but she said no when she found out parents were required to join the trips.

“I'm like, sir,” Betty Odeyingbo said, “I came from Africa so I didn't have to sleep outside.”

All that energy had to go into some outdoor activity, though. And since they were living in Texas, the people around them kept asking about football.

His parents thought they meant soccer at first.

They had no idea how this sport worked, what a third down was, why there was only sometimes a fourth down, how a score can be for 7 points but sometimes only for 2. A neighbor offered a crash course, but soon enough, they were having to learn through their sons’ youth games.

They watched Dare chase around a young Kyler Murray. They saw him and Dayo dominate with size and speed.

But when it came time to choose a high school, Betty wanted the sport gone from their lives. She was a nurse practitioner from a family that would move to America for a medical degree before moving back to Nigeria. They’d grown competitive on academics, sometimes comparing their kids’ SAT scores.

How would she look if her kids were focused on a game?

“All football players are not very smart, they're stupid. They play football, they get injured, they make money, they blow it, blah, blah, blah, they're not smart,” Betty remembers thinking -- a thought she now admits was wrong.

“And I'm thinking, 'My kids are smart. They don't need to play football. They can go to medical school. Why do they need to play football?’"

Dayo felt that pressure the one and only time he visited Nigeria, as a junior in high school. He was struck by how well off his relatives were, putting upper middle-class American life to shame.

But in Texas, Dare's and Dayo's explosive entrances in the sport of football made it impossible to hide. Betty signed Dare up for a small private high school with a floundering football program, but he became the star of the team, and so his brother looked up to him even more.

“You know what they say about destiny,” Betty said.

The scholarships rolled in, and Dayo saw offers from Oklahoma, Texas, Michigan and Texas A&M. But the two brothers chose the one Southeastern Conference school their mother would approve of in Vanderbilt.

It meant playing together on a team for the first time. By Dayo’s sophomore season, the two were starting on the defensive line together, where the name “Odeyingbo” could flash in double in front of jam-packed crowds at The Swamp in Florida and Rocky Top in Tennessee.

“We're just here at this time,” Gary Odeyingbo remembers thinking, “but this journey for them goes a lot deeper than that.”

A football ticket to the American dream felt like a fantasy to a family of immigrants. And those emotions overflowed when Dayo became a second-round pick by the Colts in 2021. It was a day of joy for a kid they named to spread it.

But they would soon learn that at the highest level, football isn’t only a sport about joy. It’s also about pain.

The adversity can feel like a tidal wave.

And Dayo's life was about to have some rain.

'I was just trying to survive'

Months before he was set to be drafted, Dayo was training in California when he felt his Achilles pop.

It was a half-speed pass rush rep, just some work ahead of the Senior Bowl, but it brought Dayo to the ground. He could only hobble on the leg. Soon, he learned it was a tear.

He remembers freaking out for one hour before finding a way to look forward. His agent promised he’d still be drafted in the second round, and he was. Colts Director of Scouting Morocco Brown called him Hurricane Dayo for the way he'd take over games. They were betting they'd see that storm again, even after an Achilles surgery.

Dayo had to wait seven months to get on the field. He never got a training camp to build up, instead thrown into the fire midseason for a contending Colts team that needed the idea of what he could offer more than the reality.

His Achilles was only building power, and he was learning how it worked now in real time during NFL games. He remembers getting worked in his second game against the Jets. He had a game-winning forced fumble on Trevor Lawrence the next week. But mostly, he tried to just be in the right gap and run fit.

His couldn't speed his body up or his mind down enough for much else.

MORE: The multiple personalities of Michael Pittman Jr.

MORE: Chasing Tim Tebow, idolizing Tom Brady, fighting fires: Making of Colts QB Anthony Richardson

“I was just trying to survive,” Dayo said. “… Rookie year just ended up being a blur. You get thrown in that first practice and they’re like, ‘All right, you’re playing on Sunday,’ and you’re out there on Sunday. Once that week’s done, you’re onto next week and onto next week. Before you look up, the season is over.

“… It was hard. This game is all about confidence. You can lose your confidence because you might not be ready.”

The 2022 season felt like his real rookie season, and the Colts placed him in a backup role to start. They wanted him to own an "attack" scheme by first learning to trust his length and power, or the things reconstructed in that Achilles surgery.

But the Colts fired two coaches and benched a starting quarterback by midseason, capsizing a team that young players weren't going to save.

“I was just trying to stay focused through the chaos,” Dayo said.

Somewhere in that chaos, a young man began to find himself again.

He stepped into a starting role in the second half of the season, after Paye and Tyquan Lewis went down with injuries.

Those game reps created film that convinced Dayo he was physically back.

He returned to Dallas for a game at AT&T Stadium against the Cowboys. It’s the team he watched with Dare as a kid, when they dreamed of someday playing in that metropolis of a dome. The closest they got together was at Vanderbilt. Now the family could only live vicariously through one child on the field.

The Colts lost a blowout, but Dayo found a way to return to the dark place. On one third-down rush, he lined up across Zack Martin, one of his childhood heroes and a six-time first-team All-Pro guard. When the ball snapped, Dayo drove him like a blocking sled into Dak Prescott’s lap to force a sack.

“That’s when we were like, ‘We’ve got something with him,’” Colts defensive line coach Nate Ollie said.

Something new was happening here between two Nigerian immigrants and their American football star. In the mecca of the sport, in the backdrop of the home they found for themselves in a Dallas suburb, a son named for joy found his way on the biggest video board in the world by kicking the butt of one of his heroes.

To see their Yoruba name on that video board could well feelings inside all those who bear the unique Odeyingbo name.

Including one who got left behind.

International landing

The winds swirled beneath the wings of the plane as it soared over the Atlantic Ocean on its way to Germany.

When it landed, Dayo stepped into the cool air and overcast skies of Frankurt. He had a day of practice to make it through before a game against the Patriots.

He broke team meetings that Saturday and caught a ride over to a hotel, where nine family members were gathered in the lobby. His older brother, Dare, was there. And so was a group that had carpooled from England, including an uncle named Ayo.

Ayo and Dayo only met seven years ago, back when a string of Facebook messages revealed that Gary Odeyingbo had a brother he never really knew. The two were in separate foster homes in England when their father was only able to bring one with him to Nigeria. Gary, whose birth name was Adbisi, got to go.

Ayo stayed in England, where he grew up in a white family and went to a nearly all-white school and never knew anything about his Nigerian heritage or family. Not until his daughter found Betty Odeyingbo on the Internet.

In that hotel lobby in Frankfurt was only the second meeting between Dayo and Ayo. The Patriots game would be the first time he'd see his nephew play in person. That night, he asked for a sack and a win.

“We know little about each other than stories. But it felt so natural," Ayo said.

“It's weird how family is apart. But then when family comes together, you realize: Do you know what, we're actually still family?”

The next day, Dayo stepped onto a soccer field under darkening skies. The air felt cool and still. Deutsche Bank Park featured hordes of Patriots jerseys but also those of every single team in the NFL, a multicolored cornucopia of the growing international fascination with the American game.

Dayo could feel his family there that day. They pulsated his every move across the world.

“I wanted to make them proud and make them excited to have this last name,” Dayo said.

The Patriots took the opening drive into field goal range, driving toward the end zone where Dare, Ayo and seven other family members sat. Mac Jones dropped back on a 3^rd-and-6, felt pressure from DeForest Buckner and stepped up into the pocket, where Dayo peeled off a double team and threw Jones down for the first sack.

On the next drive, Dayo gave an inside fake to a guard before swimming over top of him. The guard pushed him off-balance, and a flying Dayo threw out his right arm like a karate chop to Jones’ leg to knock him down for the second sack.

On the next series, Jones dropped back on first down and there came Dayo on a stunt from the right edge into the face of a center. Like he did against Zack Martin, Dayo drove the center back into a running back’s position and grabbed Jones and tossed him to the ground for the third sack.

It was his first three-sack game since high school. He celebrated by stomping the ground.

“Just seeing him realize that he could physically compete, mentally compete and then even dominate on some occasions," said his brother, Dare, "was a really cool experience for me.”

Th Colts would beat the Patriots 10-6, and after the game, Dayo returned through the soccer pitch back onto the field and heard the chants of his family.

“Dayo! Dayo! Dayo!”

Joy had arrived.

A perfect storm

Hurricanes cause death and destruction, but they do have a place in the environment. By pulling temperatures from the equator to the poles, they regulate the planet and make it whole.

That's the space Dayo is tying to live in right now. For the first time in his NFL career, he feels firmly in control of his mind and body.

“Before, I felt like I was just figuring it out. I was feeling out the game, checking the temperature instead of setting the temperature,” Dayo said. "At this point in my career, I’m leaning more into setting the tone and playing with that edge and that physicality that you need to play the game.”

On a 7-6 Colts team tied for third in the league with 42 sacks, Dayo's 6.5 sacks and thunderous stomps are throwing power to those around him.

“It’s infectious," DeForest Buckner said. "People feed off that energy he’s bringing each and every week."

Dayo's path through football has become a swirl of cultural and chemical contradictions. A boy named for joy who found an American sport he could dominate enough to convince his parents to let him play has to become a man who will toss a guard into submission if it means cracking a quarterback in his rib cage.

He has to reach both, because this league doesn't waste time or money on the men caught in the undertow. Each draft has more players like Dayo, with tools and potential, waiting to be unlocked.

But on the field, when he's in control, he's speaking right to that kid with his play. That was the kid who at 6 years old would tell anyone who would listen that he’d be rich someday, and when they'd ask him how, he'd talk about football.

Now, he dreams of generational wealth, or the kind that means nobody with the name Odeyingbo will struggle.

Two years ago, as a rookie with the Colts, Dayo picked out his first dog, a German Shepard and Collie mix. He researched Yoruba names and settled on Kolawole, which means, “Wealth has come.”

“Just thinking about the odds of being in this position: My parents moved here to give us opportunities, but these weren’t the opportunities they had in mind,” Dayo said. “They were thinking, ‘Go be a doctor. Go be a lawyer.’ Playing football is something you only wind up doing by living in America.”

He is living in the path of a hurricane.

“It’s just crazy how God puts you on a path where you never know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it,” Dayo said. “You just end up in the right place at the end of the day.”

Contact Nate Atkins at natkins@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @NateAtkins_.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Colts: How Dayo Odeyingbo found fury and became an international force