It was a big night for the Cowboys’ placekicker. In fact, such a highlight could be the brightest spot for an entire career, but for Aubrey, it wasn’t even the biggest event of his week.
On Aug. 11, before the first preseason game of the year had even ended, Aubrey had to leave SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles to be by the side of his wife, Jenn Aubrey, for the birth of the couple's first child, Colton Scott Aubrey. To the average person, Aubrey’s week of family and triumph is the stuff of a Hollywood movie screenplay.
For the 29-year-old Aubrey, however, unique, movie-worthy developments have become almost common. Not boring, certainly, but over the past decade, he’s made a habit out of making dreams new and old come true.
From Futbol to Football
If you follow Dallas pro sports, there’s a decent chance you know a bit about Aubrey’s origin story. After starring in soccer at Plano Senior High School, Aubrey went to play soccer for Notre Dame on a scholarship from 2013 to 2016. He became a highly decorated athlete, including earning All-American honors after his senior year.The powerful leg that would catch the eye of one of the most famous pro teams in the world was apparent during his time in South Bend. Aubrey, a long and lean 6-foot-3, 207-pound defender, regularly stepped up to take corner kicks and penalty kicks, something a team’s top-scoring striker often does. During his senior year, Aubrey blasted a game-winning goal from 30 yards away in extra time to beat then No. 4-ranked Stanford.
From Notre Dame, Aubrey was drafted in the first round of the 2017 MLS SuperDraft by Toronto FC. But Aubrey never played a single game for Toronto’s top squad, which at the time was a star-studded, title-winning club. After a season with the lower division Toronto FC II and then spending the 2018 season in Pennsylvania with the Bethlehem Steel of MLS Next Pro, a league in the United States’ third, and lowest, division of pro soccer, it appeared that Aubrey’s sports career had come to an end.
Soccer may not have worked out for Aubrey, but in early 2019, he had two things from his Notre Dame days that gave him more than enough reason to feel good about his future: a degree in computer science and a new wife. Jenn, who played lacrosse for the Fighting Irish, was also from North Texas. The two had met just before leaving high school for South Bend, fell in love, got engaged and made their way back to North Texas when pro soccer up north didn’t pan out. They married in January 2019.
The Aubreys began to settle into a comfortable life outside of athletics. Brandon worked as a software engineer for GM Financial in Arlington while Jenn worked as a flight instructor in Sherman. The money was better than it had been in soccer, and now he had weekends off to watch a bunch of sports instead of playing only one.
It wasn’t long after getting married that the newlyweds had a conversation that would drastically change the life they were building together. It was a conversation that has been misrepresented in media reports over the past year.
While the couple watched an NFL game together one Sunday, a placekicker in the game nailed a field goal. “You could do that,” Jenn said to Brandon. A number of reports have stated that Jenn made the comment after a kicker had missed a field goal. Over the phone from Cowboys training camp in Oxnard, California, recently, Brandon Aubrey wanted to set the record straight.
“My wife would be upset with me if I didn't mention that she said I could do that after the kick was made, not missed, when we had that conversation that day,” he said with a slight chuckle. “She says I misreported that, but regardless, the rest of the conversation was just me telling her, ‘Yeah, you’re crazy.’”
It might be subtle to the uninitiated and, perhaps, a less humorous story, but there’s a significant difference in whether the “you could do that” came after a missed or made field goal. Not only because it's always good to be true and accurate, but it turns out, this was a case of one skilled athlete encouraging another skilled athlete in a way that most of us decidedly non-athletic mortals could never attempt.
Jenn was telling Brandon, whether he agreed with her or not, that he could indeed do something that she had every reason to believe he could do. It’s sort of a “Haven’t been there, but could still do that” scenario. It’s a world apart from most couple’s convos during a Sunday Cowboys game, to be sure.
Brandon Aubrey’s skepticism soon turned to at least a modicum of optimism when he and Jenn went to a high school near their home in North Texas to test his leg on a football rather than a soccer ball. After a few test kicks, he banged one through the uprights from 60 yards away.
“I was like, ‘Oh darn, maybe I do need to try this, and maybe she was right about this,’” he said. “So we found a kicking coach and went from there.”
Aubrey kicks an extra point in the first quarter against the Philadelphia Eagles at AT&T Stadium in December 2023.
Richard Rodriguez/Getty
Not Like Other Students
Brian Egan coaches kickers looking to make the jump from high school to college, and in some select cases, looking to go from kicking in college to playing on Sundays in the pros. A former college placekicker for Mississippi State, where he was a teammate of current Cowboys QB Dak Prescott, Egan was more intrigued than skeptical when it came to Aubrey’s background. When Aubrey contacted Egan about coaching him in 2019, the coach already had plenty of experience with athletes transitioning from soccer to football. Many football kickers have soccer backgrounds, Egan said, although successfully making the jump from one sport to the other isn't as easy as some movies make it out to be. Plus, most of Egan’s clientele were not married with full-time corporate careers. In fact, Aubrey’s first session with the coach was in a group of a dozen or so school-aged kickers. Even so, it didn't take Egan long to realize that his new pupil was more than just a guy barely hanging onto his glory days.
“I could tell he had real potential just by the way he struck the ball,” Egan said. “He was just a natural ball striker, and I think being in pro soccer helped him have the right mindset and work ethic. He had left the job of professional soccer and was essentially chasing a dream that he didn't know if it was attainable or not since he didn't have a football background. But he had the right mindset.”
Egan pointed out that there are only 32 of the jobs that Aubrey wanted available — a particularly challenging goal to reach. The fact that Aubrey has a cannon where most of us have a right foot is only part of the equation for success. Perhaps more important than having Aubrey train merely by kicking a bunch of field goals, he needed to develop a new type of muscle memory. The coach explained to the kicker that all kicks are not created equal, and the technical differences between kicking a soccer ball and a football required a bit of rewiring in Aubrey.
He and his pupil were practicing a few times a week in Frisco, mostly after work. Practices sometimes entailed more than merely aiming for the middle of the goalposts.
On occasion, Egan reportedly challenged Aubrey to hit tall, narrow light poles in the middle of a grassy field in a park near their usual training spot. The difficult task was warranted due to the unusually large leap the kicker was hoping to make.
“Of course, most of the guys you see playing on Sunday either played in high school and then in college and made it to the next level,” he said. “So, I always thought Brandon had the ability, but I just didn't know if the opportunity was going to arise.”
It took a while, but in 2022, less than three full years after his couch conversation with Jenn, Aubrey got the chance to put some pro football on his resume. He was drafted by the Birmingham Stallions of the USFL, a spring football league with a number of former college stars as well as players with NFL experience. So long for now, short-lived computer science career.
He promptly led the league in all major kicking categories while helping the Stallions to the USFL title. In 2023, he and his team duplicated the success of the previous year, and Aubrey again led the league’s placekickers in the top categories as his team again claimed the USFL championship.
Aubrey may have started late, but he made up for lost time in a major way. Major enough that he was invited to the training camp of two NFL teams in the summer of ’23: the Washington Commanders and the Dallas Cowboys. For Aubrey, choosing his hometown team, the one he and his family watched together every weekend, was an easy choice. A few weeks later, the older-than-usual, 28-year-old rookie, whose All-American face makes him look like he’s still in college, was the last man kicking when the final roster was announced.
Trust the Process
It’s not unusual for a pro athlete to discuss their “process” or how it's important for them to “trust the process.” In a practice-makes-perfect way, an athlete’s process for training and execution is all there is when it comes to ensuring success. Aubrey is, unsurprisingly, a big believer in adhering to his process. He became an even bigger adherent a year ago. That’s when he shanked the biggest kick of his life, which happened to be his first NFL regular season extra point attempt in his first game for the Cowboys. That’s right, one of the finest seasons any NFL placekicker has ever had, let alone a rookie, began with a miss from the 15-yard line.
Aubrey’s miss was a rare low point in the game for the ’Boys, who dominated the New York Giants in a 40–0 victory. It didn't take long for Aubrey to know where he went wrong, however. Before the kick attempt, he had gotten out of his rhythm. He didn't follow his process.
“We had just blocked a field goal, in the rain, and went down and scored a touchdown,” Aubrey recalls. “So it was a sudden change in that I went from drinking water and watching the other kicker kick and taking it all in to all of a sudden running onto the field to make my own kick. I tried to take a moment to enjoy it almost as a fan, and I wasn’t in the right mental state.”
Instead of attempting the kick just as he had done thousands upon thousands of times before in practice and in the USFL, the rookie “was out of synch and in the wrong headspace” by not preparing himself the way he had been trained for what was then the moment where his dreams finally became reality. He hurried himself, and it cost him, in that moment at least.
“So, yeah,” he said. “That was a quick lesson for me to always stay mentally prepared and to just go through my process on the field.”
His process involves keeping up with the time on the clock and the distance to a first down or to the goal line as well as kicking balls into the net on the sideline once the team gets into field goal range. Once he trots onto the field to attempt a field goal or extra point, the process becomes more mental, he said. Some key breathing techniques help to put him where he needs to be while he zeroes in on the steps in between where he’ll start his approach and where he’ll meet the ball. It’s not rocket science, but keeping the noise away so he can treat every kick the same is vitally important.
It’s fair to say the process served him well for the rest of the season. He nailed his two field goal attempts in that first game and proceeded to produce a statistically historic season for NFL placekickers. He set a league record by starting his NFL career with 35 successful field goal attempts, smashing the previous mark of 18. On Dec. 10 against the division rival Philadelphia Eagles, he became the first kicker in NFL history to make two field goals from 59 or more yards in the same game. When he nailed a first-quarter 60-yarder to give the ’Boys a 10-0 lead, Aubrey was kicking the ball from the top tip of the Cowboys star logo on the 50-yard line. The way the ball sailed through the posts suggested it would’ve been good from almost 70 yards. It was quite the mind-bending sight.
Aubrey finished the season with the highest completion percentage (94.7%) and the most field goals made (36) in the NFL, earning him first team All-Pro honors alongside superstars such as Lamar Jackson and Christian McCaffrey.
Of course, when it comes to discussions of the most important players on the field, the placekicker rarely gets included. But that doesn't mean it’s a position that can’t have a major impact on the game plan.
“When the Cowboys are playing indoors, they legit just need to get the ball to the 50-yard line to be in field goal range,” says 97.1 The Eagle radio host Kevin Turner, who also co-hosts the One Star Cowboys podcast. “It reminds me a lot of how [long drive specialist golfer] Bryson DeChambeau has such an advantage off the tee in golf.”
Aubrey is all smiles following a 33–13 victory over the Philadelphia Eagles.
Richard Rodriguez/Getty
He Is 'That Guy'
The act of kicking isn't the only connection Aubrey sees between his soccer past and NFL present. Like a baseball pitcher, the placekicker can seem alone on an island even when surrounded by giants in full armor. Sure, he has blockers, but the success or failure of a kick hinges almost completely on one man and one foot. Aside from the QB, there’s arguably no other position in football where a player can go from goat to G.O.A.T. or vice versa as quickly as the kicker can in a single game, let alone during an entire season.Aubrey likes it that way. He has always welcomed the opportunity to have everyone’s eyes on him when the perfect kick is needed. It’s not unlike the flashy wide receiver who relishes getting open so that he has the chance to bring the crowd to its feet. It’s just that Aubrey is now occupying that role for the team that God watches through the hole in AT&T Stadium’s retractable roof instead of a soccer field in Plano, Indiana, Canada or the Rust Belt. As it turns out, there’s a mental process to the way Aubrey navigates pressure too.
“I was the guy who took the penalties for Notre Dame,” he said. “I took them throughout high school. I wanted to take set pieces because I had faith in my abilities to hit the ball the way I practiced. I’ve always had confidence in my ability to handle pressure, and a lot of pressure is really just perceived anyways. If you go out there and focus internally on what you can do to follow your process as opposed to the results of the situation, you’ll just focus on what you need to do to kick the ball through the uprights. Then, there’s not a lot of room to perceive any pressure.”
Incoming
On Aug. 7, just a few days before he became a father, Aubrey posted a video to his Instagram account. Behind an artsy filter, the slow-mo video shows a closeup of the kicker as he takes a couple steps before smacking the air out of a football. The caption reads simply, but confidently, “Season 2 incoming.”Only one year ago, Aubrey wasn’t in a position to be so self-assured about his spot in the top league of a sport he had been playing for only four years. But he didn't make it this far to let up now. He’s going to stick to the process.
“I do feel secure this year,” he said. “But as a specialist, everyone can see if your performance is poor, and then you hear calls for change, so you’re never really super secure from kick to kick. But out here at camp, I feel a lot more secure than ever before. I feel like I belong on this team.”
