Twin defensive backs Tristin and Zyon McCollum will square off Monday when the Eagles face the Bucs

Long before Tristin McCollum suited up on special teams for the Eagles, he was a diehard Birds fan surviving a family full of Dallas Cowboys loyalists while spending his early years in the Dallas suburb of Lewisville, Texas.

McCollum, however, wasn’t the only “traitor,” as his mother, Tisha, calls him in jest. He had a partner-in-fandom to weather the storm of their family’s disapproval: his twin brother, Zyon. Tristin, ever the contrarian, adopted the Eagles as his team to irk his family members, and his brother followed suit.

“We would talk so much trash to our family and get so mad and so animated when the Eagles lost and all that,” Tristin told The Inquirer. “So it’s crazy. It comes full circle.”

Growing up, the identical McCollum twins did everything together. They rooted for the same handpicked NFL team. They discovered their shared affinity for football in elementary school while playing flag football at the local YMCA. They hit their growth spurts at the same time. They both became defensive backs. They committed to Sam Houston State to play their college ball, living together and embarking upon degrees in biomedical science with the mutual goal of going to medical school if careers as professional athletes didn’t pan out.

But their paths diverged at the NFL level — with Tristin joining the Eagles this season and Zyon playing cornerback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — until now. For the first time in their lives, the McCollum brothers are poised to share the football field as opponents when the Eagles take on the Buccaneers in the wild-card round of the playoffs on Monday night.

Although Tristin has been elevated from the practice squad to the active roster three times during the regular season, that number resets to zero in the playoffs, allowing the Eagles to elevate him again without a limit. Tristin said he expects to be on the field again on Monday. Then, his football journey will converge with his brother’s once more.

“That’s the kind of stuff that we dreamed about, that we talked about when we were super, super young, and possibly making it to the NFL,” Zyon said. “Like, ‘What if we played against each other one game?’ And the fact that it, well, now it’s actually happening, it’s pretty crazy.”

Tisha knew early on that robust T-ball careers weren’t in the cards for her twin boys in elementary school.

Bored in the outfield, Tristin and Zyon preferred to chase butterflies over fielding the occasional ball. Still, she encouraged them to try everything, including flag football at the YMCA in Lewisville. The twins quickly took to the sport, with Tristin assuming the role of quarterback and Zyon at receiver.

“He just used to throw me bombs all day, every day,” Zyon said. “And we would win. We would blow teams out and it was amazing. We just had one play. It was just him throwing me vertical balls the whole game.

“I guess I really just fell in love with it because of Tristin. Because we used to pass the football, and it got us really, really close to each other. And it kept us that way.”

Tristin and Zyon complemented each other on and off the field. Tisha learned that her sons weren’t just identical twins, they were mirror twins. One twin’s physical features on the right side of his body, including their birthmarks, is mirrored on the other’s left side. As they grew older, their personalities were opposite of each other’s, too, with Tristin evolving into more of the jokester and Zyon becoming the serious one.

Their passion for football remained identical. Although they dabbled in basketball, following in the footsteps of their father, Cory Carr, who played for the Chicago Bulls, they were always the smallest boys in their grade and didn’t see a viable path forward in the sport. By the time they moved to Galveston, Texas, and became freshmen on the football team at Ball High School, they were still “the shortest, the scrawniest, the skinniest,” according to Tisha.

“What I told them, and no, I wasn’t completely sure that they were going to reach at least 6-2,” Tisha said. “But I told them that they were. And I told them that them having to work so much harder, being the smallest, is going to pay dividends when they finally grow into their heights. And it really did. It made them, from a mindset, like, always having to overcome and come from behind.

“Once you get that mindset going and it’s a habit, it’s a habitual thing and it’s just the way you live your life.”

The summer after their freshman year, Tristin and Zyon hit their growth spurts, shooting up so quickly that Tisha said they still have stretch marks on their backs. As a single mother, her biggest expense every month aside from rent was food for fueling her rapidly-developing sons. Their growth, coupled with their hard work in the weight room and on the football field, eventually paid off, leading to offers from and eventually commitments to Sam Houston State.

“They just weren’t ready to separate at that time,” Tisha said. “They wanted to have the college experience together, on the same field together, and I guess that was just kind of part of their journey.”

Halfway through their college careers before the pre-draft process ramped up, Tristin and Zyon began to discuss a future apart. For their entire lives, they were never separated by more than a few feet, but they knew that they had a strong likelihood of splitting up at the NFL level.

Even if they drew interest from the same team, however, they agreed that separating was mutually beneficial.

“We didn’t want to be like those twins that live in the same house, drive the same car, end up finding and marrying twins,” Zyon said. “We wanted to be individuals. So we basically said, at least for the first year, we can’t be on the same team. And we have to become individuals ourselves.”

Tristin felt the same way: “The love isn’t going anywhere, the communication, the camaraderie isn’t going anywhere, but we just can’t have not having the other one affect us in a negative way,” he said. “So we started talking about it, started pushing each other emotionally in that way.”

On the third day of the 2022 draft, the hypothetical became a reality. While Zyon was seated on a sofa in his aunt’s living room, with Tisha and Tristin to his right, Buccaneers general manager Jason Licht and coach Todd Bowles called him and delivered the news that the organization was taking him in the fifth round, No. 157 overall.

Shortly afterward, the Buccaneers contacted Tristin and expressed interest in signing him as an undrafted free agent.

“We had already talked about it, but when it’s right there in your face, it’s so much more real,” Zyon said. “And we decided that we had to stick with our gut with our guns, and he turned that down.”

Instead, Tristin opted to sign with the Houston Texans. After one season in Houston, Tristin signed a reserve/futures contract with his childhood team, the Eagles, ultimately earning a spot on the practice squad out of training camp. Tristin has been active for three regular-season games, most recently earning reps at gunner on special teams in Week 18 against the New York Giants when safety Sydney Brown went down with a torn ACL.

“He brings some speed,” special teams coordinator Michael Clay said of Tristin. “A guy that can run 4.4. Good size. He’s very cerebral. He’s always intent. When he’s not called up on game day, he helps with the practice squad, give us looks of the opposing team. But when his number is called, he’s very attentive.

“He knows exactly what he’s supposed to do on his assignment, and he’s helped us a lot.”

The weight of the anticipated moment between her sons finally hit Tisha on Thursday night at her home in McKinney, Texas.

She welled up as she reflected on their journey, from undersized and often overlooked to NFL players set to face off on one of football’s biggest stages. Tristan is now listed at 6-foot-3 and 195 pounds, Zyon at 6-2, 199.

“It was the hardest route for them and probably the most unlikely, but the three of us believed so much that if you put in the work and you try and give everything you possibly have to something, it’s got to work out,” Tisha said. “It has to. It’s just universal law, right?”

Tisha has a custom-made split jersey bearing both of her sons’ colors that she plans on wearing to Raymond James Stadium for the game. Tristin anticipates that she’ll be a “water park ” of tears, and neither brother shied away from admitting that they may get emotional, too, when they see each other on the opposite sideline.

“I would not be where I am today without Tristin,” Zyon said. “Because just the talks that we’ve had about personal growth, mentally, physically, spiritually. We just worked so hard together. And we had so many people telling us that we couldn’t do it and we weren’t going to be anything because we were so small and so skinny or too nice or all type of stuff.

“But I knew that everybody else was a liar because I knew that my brother was telling the truth. So, man, I love him so much.”

Tristin concurred: “We’ve always been just almost everything to each other,” he said. “And I probably wouldn’t even be playing football to this aspect if it wasn’t for him and us pushing each other, us waking each other up on those early mornings, us getting into the film room and just egging each other on to just continue to grow.

“I really can’t even imagine what my life would be without him.”