Sibling rivalries are natural. Trey was a standout in football, basketball and baseball. Toby wrestled after football season, as did Trey’s fraternal twin, Dylan.
Trey and Toby are open that they always wanted to see the other succeed, but, Trey admitted, “I always wanted to be known as the best of all the kids.”
“Toby always rubs in my face, he was a state champion in wrestling three times and I never won state in anything in my career,” Trey said with a smile. “That’s still something to this day he still hangs over my head.”
Toby, though, saw what was coming in his younger brother. During the recruiting process, Toby attended a handful of football camps at universities like CSU, Wyoming and Nebraska to get himself noticed. What he noticed while there reminded him of Trey.
“You see the athletes running and jumping and you think, ‘I see this every day in my backyard,'” Toby said.
Not once did Toby lean into Trey about attending Colorado State. He knew of Trey’s many offers through his parents but refrained from discussing it with Trey. Trey had so many options – many more than Toby – that the older brother didn’t want to sway him.
Toby was hopeful Trey would end up in Fort Collins, however. Eventually, that’s exactly what Trey chose, in part because the school had recruited him from jump, and in part to reunite on the field with Toby.
Again, it was the day to day Toby saw that made him bullish on his brother’s future. One of Toby’s teammates was future Cowboys wide receiver Michael Gallup, who had eye-popping physical skills.
“When we’d go out in the yard and Dylan and I tried to hit rocks with a baseball bat – because that’s what you do out in the country – we couldn’t do it like Trey,” Toby said. “This guy’s hand-eye coordination is unreal. Then in college, watching how some guys could make the catch, their body control, there were only one or two guys who could do it. Trey was one of them. That’s when I knew he was NFL special.”
Trey wasn’t thinking NFL when he arrived at CSU. He just wanted a degree. But he was named first-team All-Mountain West as a sophomore, and suddenly, being a pro came into focus.
That was also the same year he got to play with Toby for the first time. The elder McBride missed almost two whole seasons after suffering three herniated discs in his back and requiring surgery. Trey was there as both a support system and surrogate.
“It was the hardest thing I had to go through,” Toby said. “Trey being on the team made it a lot easier. When you get hurt, you get thrown off to the side. You lose that feeling of the team. But with Trey there, I got to live that through him.”
Said Trey, “I was excelling and him seeing me doing well, I think that was encouraging for him and kept his spirits high.”
In some ways, it helped. Toby ended up playing at CSU through 2021, long enough to be teammates with Trey through Trey’s whole college career. Then, with the NFL beckoning and Trey negotiating new waters, it was Toby’s turn to be the anchor.
