Josh Downs will feel the jitters from inside a tunnel at Mercedes-Benz Stadium this Sunday. He’ll have a white Colts helmet strapped tight, a bounce in his cleats and a ping in his heart.

It’ll be Christmas Eve. And he’ll be home.

He’ll emerge to a cheering section of more than 20 people, from a father and a mother and a brother and a sister to grandparents and uncles and aunts. It'll be his first game in the NFL in front of his brother, Caleb; and his sister, Kameron.

They’ll all be here to watch like they once did on his draft night, back when he cried so hard he couldn’t speak as his father doused him in champagne.

“Hallelujah!” his father, Gary Downs, screamed that night.

He’ll be screaming more on Sunday.

Through that tunnel will come a son who has become the most impressive rookie on the Colts, a starting slot receiver who has hit the ground running despite his lack of size so well that he's drawing comparisons to a young T.Y. Hilton.

Gary Downs will be back in the place where he played three years as a running back for the Falcons. It’s where, in his third season in 2000, his wife became pregnant with their second child while in graduate school, making it time to settle down.

They named him Joshua, after the book in the Bible, and he arrived on Aug. 12, 2001. That was the year Gary didn’t make the Falcons roster. He ended a six-year NFL career where all but two of his games were as a backup. He played 48 games with the Falcons.

But none of them will compare to Sunday’s, when the boy who entered his life when they ended for him will now emerge from the tunnel.

A family forged by football

Josh’s earliest football memory is sharp in his mind. He’s six years old in the basement of the Downs’ house in Suwanee, and his dad wants to do some tackling drills.

Gary Downs was six years retired by now, but he still felt an adrenaline rush as he slipped into his Falcons pads and strapped on his Giants helmet. From his knees, he wrapped up Josh for a tackle.

“I'm gonna show you how to put pads on, and I'm gonna show you how to hit, how to be hit,” Gary Downs said of the moment.

Josh knew how to tackle almost as early as he knew how to hug. Tackle and be tackled, hug and be hugged. That’s how the boys in the Downs and Bly families grow up together.

When Tanya and her sister, Kristyn, went to college, their brother warned them to stay away from the football players, but neither listened. Tanya met Gary at a college party at North Carolina State. At the rival school of North Carolina, Kristyn joined the dance team and began dating the team’s star cornerback, Dre Bly.

“We got the good ones,” Tanya Downs said.

That’s when a football family started to really grow. Gary had a brother who was an assistant coach at Georgia. Along with Bly and one of Tanya’s brothers, they combined to have six sons who would go on to play football at universities such as North Carolina, Alabama, Duke, Holy Cross, Charlotte and Old Dominion.

Their backyard games at holiday time were intense and bruising, so much so that they didn’t let Caleb, Josh’s younger brother, play for a few years. It delayed what turned out to be the best athlete of them all -- the one who would turn the fire up in his older brother’s gut.

“He just saw Caleb just run through everybody. I'm talking about scoring 6-7 touchdowns a game with 15 tackles and his team won the championship like every year,” Gary Downs said.

As Caleb ran roughshod over teams, Josh would stand on the sidelines and yell to his opponents: “Tackle him!” knowing they couldn't.

An older brother feared the younger one catching up, in size and in dominance. Three years apart can feel like a generation everywhere except for between the white lines, which just happens to be the place where names are earned in this family.

A brother at his heels

When Caleb turned 11 or 12, he finally told Josh he wasn’t scared of him anymore. And that’s when they started to train with their dad at the park.

Gary Downs would start them with high knees before moving onto ladder and cone drills and bungee running up a hill. He wanted to build a lower body in them that could mirror a running back’s, and he had the blueprint as a high school coach in the area who would go on to coach running backs at East Tennessee State.

In Caleb, he would find the total package, as he would grow up to inherit his same 6-foot size, which allowed him to bulk up to 203 pounds by the time he was a freshman in college. That DNA and training ended up creating the No. 8 recruit in the 2023 recruiting class and a true freshman safety who is now the leading tackler for Alabama in the College Football Playoff as the Southeastern Conference Newcomer of the Year.

“He was always the best,” Josh Downs said. “I was always one of the best.”

(Caleb was not granted permission by the Alabama football program to speak for this story.)

Josh didn’t inherit the same 6-foot height, or even close. He grew to be 5-9, which put him more in line with his uncles and cousins on both sides of the family but not his brother or father.

“Imagine that Josh is built just like me from the waist down,” Gary Downs said. “He's built more like his mom, let's say an upper body of a girl to the shoulders.”

One day as a sophomore at North Gwinnett High School, a coach told him he couldn’t play high school football in Georgia without getting snapped in half, and Josh stormed into the house crying.

His parents tried to find him a different way to be great. They urged him in baseball, which Bly also played at North Carolina. Josh was a star shortstop and second baseman on a travel team but felt no passion in the game. He quit before he even made it to high school.

Some part of him couldn’t just let his brother take their family’s game as he stepped aside. So he made the training sessions with Gary and Caleb a competition to outwork them both. He started to live in the weight room.

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Soon enough, with the shiftiness of a running back and hands that never seemed to fail, he became a receiver that none of the bigger kids could cover.

To compensate for a smaller catch radius, he started laying out for passes, stretching the full extension of his 5-9 frame. He had one in a state championship game his junior season to lead a game-winning drive.

“That’s when I was like, ‘This man can really make any play on the field if he really wanted to,’” said Colts running back Tyler Goodson, who was a star running back on Josh’s team at North Gwinnett. “If he’s on the field, the play’s going to be made.’”

Josh and Caleb played at different high schools, but they did get one game against each other. Josh was a senior at North Gwinnett and Caleb a freshman at Mill Creek when they squared off. Tanya asked Caleb’s coach if he could sit him and Josh’s coach if he could not line up on Caleb, but neither one listened.

They traded blows, with Josh at wide receiver and Caleb at cornerback. Josh faked a route to the flat and cut inside on an angle route, where he took the pass in for a touchdown.

Another pass came his way that Caleb jumped up and swatted away.

“It was a bad ball,” Josh Downs said of the pass breakup. “It was an out-and-up. I had beaten him by a step or two and the quarterback threw it to me. … I scored on him. That’s a little worse.”

The older brother notched one final victory over his younger brother. After the game, they snapped a photo together, with Gary Downs wearing the shirt that the family had made for the game, which read, "A team divided but Downs united."

The scholarship offers began to pour in for Josh, from Ohio State and Michigan and Oregon and North Carolina State, where his dad was a star and where he really wanted his son to go.

But one day, Gary Downs’ phone rang and Bly was on the other end.

Mack Brown just got hired at North Carolina, Bly told him.

“And?” Gary Downs asked back.

Bly said he was joining the staff as cornerbacks coach.

And that’s when Gary Downs knew what was about to happen.

A wait in agony

Josh Downs did not follow his father to North Carolina State. He instead joined his uncle with the Tar Heels, ensuring that a path through the game they loved could include as many of them as possible in the same place.

"It's hard to mix family and business, right?" Bly said. "My pitch to Gary and Tanya was that I was going to be there to look after him. I was going to let him grow and let him experience college. But there was going to be nothing like having an uncle right there.

"Family support is the thing. It's tough for these kids to go to school and deal with some of the things that they deal with. But if you have somebody there that can care for you when you need it but also let you live and grow up, I felt like there was no better situation than that."

Like Bly, Josh went on to become a program legend. He became a first-team All-Atlantic Coast Conference receiver in back-to-back seasons, despite playing with two different quarterbacks. With more than 2,400 yards and 22 touchdowns, he had as much production as almost any receiver entering the NFL Draft.

Not a single team asked to meet with him, which was an indication that teams didn’t have questions about him. Add in the bloodlines and production, plus a father and an uncle who had been through this, and he didn’t expect to wait long to hear his name called in the NFL Draft.

So the Downs rented a lake house with more than 10 bedrooms. They invited the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. They prepared food and drinks for all three nights, hoping they could explode into jubilation on one of the first two.

They set up a sign that spelled out the origin of his name, Joshua 1:9: "Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or discouraged. For the lord your God will be with you wherever you go."

He'd need all the faith he could find as the draft dragged on, and the picks rolled by, and Josh didn’t go in the first round or in the second either. A crowd of more than 100 friends and family members, including Josh’s preschool teacher, sat by in stunned silence as other players on TV heard their phones buzz and their dreams come true.

Eleven different receivers went off the board without Josh's phone ringing a single time. Almost none of them had the statistics Downs did. What they had was more height than 5-foot-9 and more weight than 171 pounds. And as those dimensions flashed on the screen and analysts spoke up the potential of their bodies more than the current realities, Josh felt miscast within the game he loves.

“I don’t want people to say, ‘Oh, he’s smaller so he can’t go and get those contested balls. He can’t get physical with a DB,’” Josh said. “I don’t like anybody thinking they’ll just physically outdo me. I’ve never been that type to let someone think that. I’m going to do anything possible. If you’re a DB and you think you can just grab me, then I’m going to push off and slap you in the face. I’m going to do whatever. And you’re going to say, ‘Hold up.’ You’re going to second-guess about trying to physically outdo me. Also, I’m shorter, so I have a lower center of gravity. So even if you’re taller than me, I can hold my own every single time.

“That’s more personal.”

At one point, Josh couldn’t take the stifled air of the house. He burst outside without his phone, followed only by Caleb.

As he paced back and forth in a dark driveway, Caleb stood by his side and talked him down from his fears and anxieties.

“It was like he was the older brother calming his little brother,” Tanya Downs said. “His rock was Caleb.”

At one point during the third round, Gary sprinted outside with Josh's phone. It was buzzing, and Josh picked up and there was Colts general manager Chris Ballard on the other end. The whole house had come outside, and after a silent pause from Josh came the tears, and then came his father’s scream.

Josh choked back enough to get out a few words to his new general manager and coach.

“I swear to you, you will not regret this,” Josh said. “I swear to you. …

“You’ve got a real competitor and a great player. I’m coming.”

Then Gary Downs popped two bottles of champagne, dousing his first-born son in nostalgia and memory.

“This is my dude, man. I poured so much into him and just to see this little kid that I've been pouring into all these years,” Gary Downs said. “That little kid in the helmet that was too big to fit, the smallest thing on the football field. To see him get drafted, to see all the things he did in youth, in middle school, high school and even college. The guy was first-team All-ACC back-to-back years, he was an All-American and then to finally realize he’s getting drafted …

“It's not done, but it's still like, ‘We did it. We got here.’”

A Christmas with the Downs family

Sunday is a chance for this family to be a family again on Christmas Eve, the one way they know how.

It’ll be Caleb’s first time seeing his brother play in the NFL, a visit squeezed in during his two days off from preparation for the Rose Bowl. It’ll be his older sister Kameron’s first as well, as she’s on break from medical school at Wake Forest.

It will be Gary and Tanya’s first game here as visiting fans, now 23 years after Gary used to run out of the tunnel in Falcons colors.

Now, they’ll get to see Josh do it. He's up to 57 catches for 631 yards and two touchdowns and has flirted with some Colts rookie receiving records.

Bly will not get to watch the game live, as he'll be coaching the Lions cornerbacks at the exact same time. But with a receivers coach Bly used to go to battle against in Reggie Wayne, he believes his nephew fell to exactly where he needed to in the draft.

"The one thing he lacks is size," Bly said. "But that's been his journey his whole life. He's always been overlooked because of his size. A lot of people don't think he's durable because of his size. They don't think he will be able to hold up against bigger DBs because of his size.

"And that's all that Josh needed. When you doubt him, that's when he's going to prove you wrong."

Josh will be a starting slot receiver and punt returner, two vicious roles for a rookie and the smallest player on the roster. In his first game doing both against the Steelers, Josh's aunt squirmed as he took punts back, afraid of the hits that would come to his compact diaphragm.

But they named him what they did for a reason.

“Just like Joshua in the Bible, our Joshua is a warrior," Tanya Downs said. "He works hard. He's not afraid of anything or anybody. He will go up against the biggest and the best. He doesn't care.”

They’ll wear his No. 1 jersey and scream his name. He will stare straight ahead, much like he did through his tears in the hysteria of the draft call that got him this chance.

But he’ll feel them there, staring down at him, and the emotions will stir up inside him.

One shake and he's like a snow globe.

“We know,” Josh said, “that family is all you’ve got.”

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

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Colts: How Josh Downs, smallest player on the field, made the NFL