At NFL combine, Caleb Downs touts strength of football in Gwinnett County

Former Georgia high school football standouts Josh and Caleb Downs have recently made arguments for Gwinnett County as the best high school football county in America.

Caleb, the younger Downs brother and a former AJC Super 11 selection, took a stand for Gwinnett County during his NFL Scouting Combine news conference Thursday. The projected first-round NFL draft pick was asked what made Gwinnett County the country’s best football county, and the former Mill Creek standout was quick to respond.

“If you ask college coaches where is a great place to recruit, they’re going to say Gwinnett,” Caleb said. “Gwinnett has great coaching. There’s great players, great talent, and we have some of the best competition levels in the nation.”

Caleb Downs’ statement came just 15 days after Josh Downs went viral for a similar argument on the brothers’ podcast, “Downs 2 Business.”

The rant came in response to a statement from Detroit Lions star receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown, an alumnus of California powerhouse Mater Dei.

“There’s three states that have the best ball. You guys are fourth,” St. Brown said. “It’s California, Texas, Florida and then it’s Georgia.”

The elder Downs brother took the lead that time, arguing that Gwinnett County was the best football county in the nation.

Josh Downs pointed out that St. Brown played for a California-based private school. Mater Dei’s student body is smaller than most Gwinnett County schools, but it isn’t confined to a certain zone like Gwinnett County schools are.

That means schools like Mater Dei can have students that reside anywhere close enough to commute to the school. Mater Dei resides in California’s talent-rich Orange County, home to over three million people.

With that in mind, Josh Downs made his case for Gwinnett County.

“If we recruited all of the people in Gwinnett County on one football team, it would beat the whole nation,” Downs said.

Recent NFL drafts provide more support for Downs’ case.

Nine former Gwinnett County high school players were picked in the 2023 NFL draft. That was more than the totals of 42 states that included Ohio (eight), Pennsylvania (six), Alabama (four), Oklahoma (four) and Tennessee (two). In 2025, seven more former Gwinnett players were taken.

St. Brown’s alma mater has won three of the last five consensus national championships, but Gwinnett County’s Buford is the reigning consensus champion. The Wolves beat Carrollton in the Class 6A final, a game which many national pollsters considered to be a de facto national championship.

One national pollster discussed the difficulty difference between winning a national championship as a Gwinnett County public school and winning one as a private school in California at Buford’s national championship celebration in January.

“This isn’t like when Valdosta won it, when LaGrange won it. It’s a tougher road now,” one ESPN representative said. “You have two schools out in Los Angeles, California, that get to pull from a pool of about 13 million kids. You have private schools in South Florida that get to pull from the most talent-rich area of the country. You have schools in Dallas, Texas, and Houston, Texas.

“They don’t split like Gwinnett County, that when they get to a certain amount of students, they build a new high school and take half of the athletes from Mill Creek to another school.”

The Downs brothers and St. Brown are the latest NFL voices to join the national debate. Former Westlake quarterback Cam Newton delivered a passionate rant of his own in July after Georgia had the most top-100 teams in MaxPreps’ preseason national rankings.

“You want to go get a good lineman, you may want to go to the Midwest, but our fail-safe is Georgia,” Newton said. “You want to go get a quarterback, yeah, we’re going to go to California, yeah, we’re going to go to Texas, maybe Florida. But you can go to Georgia.

“You want an old, physical tight end? Yeah, we can go Midwest again, we can go to Texas again, maybe go up north to Maryland or something like that, but you can always come to Georgia.”