The first time Gavin Locklear shook hands with Justin Joly, his entire hand disappeared.

Locklear is the tight ends coach at North Carolina State. In January 2024, he greeted Joly, a tight end who had transferred from Connecticut to play his final two seasons with the Wolfpack.

“I promise you, I won’t ever forget shaking his hand for the first time,” Locklear told The Denver Gazette with a laugh. “His hands are ginormous and he just engulfs your hand. And at the same time, he looks you dead in the eyes and he’s going to put this death grip on your hand. He almost tried to crush my hand.”

Joly is bringing his big mitts to Denver, starting with a May 8-10 rookie minicamp. The Broncos selected him in the fifth round of the NFL draft last Saturday.

Joly, 21, still needs work on his blocking but his receiving skills are intriguing. He caught 43 passes for 661 yards in 2024 for the Wolfpack and followed that up last season with 49 grabs for 489 yards while having just one drop.

With a hand size that measures 10 5/8^th inches, that sure helps.

“He’s got really strong hands,” North Carolina State head coach Dave Doeren told The Denver Gazette. “He can go up and snatch a ball. And he does a great job of keeping bodies off him. He’s a former basketball guy, so he really understands how to box out and uses his frame to his advantage.”

The 6-foot-4, 240-pound native of Brewster, N.Y., was a solid basketball player at Iona Preparatory Upper School, an all-boys school in New Rochelle, N.Y. But he was better at football and took his game to Connecticut.

Joly caught 18 passes for 250 yards as a freshman in 2022 and followed that with 56 grabs for 578 yards in 2023. In the opener of his sophomore season, Joly caught the eye of Doeren by catching four passes for 38 yards in the Huskies’ 24-14 loss to the Wolfpack.

“I had a chance to see him and he had a great body-type frame that we thought we could develop and when he went in the (transfer) portal, we were looking for an older player at his position and we kind of thought he was the right fit for both sides,” Doeren said. “We needed an athletic position player at that group.”

Joly played at about 240 pounds in 2024, but the thinking was he needed to put on weight to improve his blocking. So he beefed up to 260 pounds for last season.

“We didn’t really have an endpoint on how big we wanted him to be,” Doeren said. “It was more about keeping his speed, gaining muscle mass and helping himself in the blocking area. We felt like coming back to college for his senior year, the biggest thing he could do was become a better blocker. He trained hard in the weight room and just put the weight on.”

However, after the season, Joly’s representatives deemed he would be better suited in the NFL to return to about 240 pounds to maximize his explosiveness.

“He’s better closer to 240 than to 260,” NFL Network draft analyst Charles Davis told The Denver Gazette. “He dropped a lot of weight in the postseason and looked pretty darn good.”

Joly was projected by some analysts to go in the third or fourth round of the draft but slipped to the No. 152 overall pick in the fifth round. It ended up perhaps hurting him that he declined to run the 40-yard dash at both the combine in February and at his pro day in March. Joly was just the 11^th tight end selected in the draft, but one reason for that was that other teams were looking for players at the position who were now more adept at blocking.

Nevertheless, there were big cheers when Joly’s name was heard on television at his apartment in Raleigh, N.C., where he had gathered with friends and family members. Plenty of commotion could be heard when he got on a conference call with Denver media minutes after his selection.

“There’s probably like 20 people at my house right now, and they just saw the TV, and they are going crazy right now, to say the least,” Joly said then.

Locklear wasn’t at the party when Joly was taken. But immediately after hearing the news, he made the six-minute drive to Joly’s apartment.

“When I got over there, he had the boom box cranking with music,” Locklear said. “Meek Mill’s ‘Dreams and Nightmares’ was on. Everybody was cheering. Everybody was very excited. I got to talk to his parents, and it obviously was a scene of joy and happiness.”

Eventually, though, Joly turned serious.

“There was a point when I was talking to him and he had a big smile on his face and a few seconds later, he was very straight-faced and it was, ‘I can’t wait to get to work,'” Locklear said.

Doeren called Joly a “really caring guy who cares tremendously about his teammates.” He said Joly “loves to work and loves to train” and is “super competitive.” He made note of those traits to Denver scouts who called before the draft to ask about the tight end.

Now, Joly will take his competitive spirit to the NFL. He doesn’t deny he needs to get “better at the run game,” but overall believes he can make a notable contribution to the Broncos.

“I’m super confident obviously,” Joly said. “I feel like I’m going to have more coaching as well, so just being able to go (to Denver) and show off that I can do both, catching and blocking. I feel like the Broncos have faith in me. They chose me for a reason there.”

One reason is the hope Joly can become the “Joker” that head coach Sean Payton has regularly talked about wanting to have since he arrived in Denver in 2023, a player who can create mismatches in the passing game in the middle of the field.

The Broncos thought they had found such a player when they signed veteran tight end Evan Engram as a free agent in March 2025. But Engram had a so-so first Denver season, catching 50 passes for 461 yards with just one touchdown. He turns 32 on Sept. 2 and is entering the final year of his contract.

“(Joly’s) ability is really run after catch, ability to get open in the scramble drill and then win on one-on-one,” said Broncos assistant general manager Reed Burckhardt. “He fits a lot of those things that Sean’s looking for, and he’s got to develop and he’s got a ways to go in all those areas, like all our rookies will. But he has upside in those areas.”

Along the way, Joly’s big hands figure to help.