From Plano Soccer Star to Cowboys Kicker
If you need to perceive how a mild-mannered software program engineer from Plano grew to become one of the best kicker within the NFL, begin with the time 23-year-old Brandon Aubrey procrastinated on his homework. It was the autumn of 2018, and his plan was to put his pc science diploma from Notre Dame to good use as a result of that was the wise factor to do. He had lately returned residence after two uneventful years in skilled soccer and wanted to brush up on his C++ earlier than interviewing for jobs. But he was misplaced.
The extra he tried to research, the extra he fixated on a deeply unsensible concept: a second likelihood at athletic stardom, in a sport he hadn’t performed since his freshman yr of highschool, at a place he as soon as thought you couldn’t earn a school scholarship for, not to mention make a life out of. He understood the highway forward could be lengthy and the chances longer nonetheless. But he additionally knew what it was like to get up each morning and really feel like somewhat a part of him had died as a result of he let the largest dream he ever chased slip away.
So at some point he peeled open a programming e-book and, as an alternative of creating notes within the margins, wrote a letter to his future spouse, Jenn Blum, on the within cowl. He advised her that he failed, and that he knew precisely how. Then he listed all of the issues he’d do otherwise this time round. He would reside within the gymnasium and, with the assistance of a coach with nearly as a lot to show as he did, make his leg extra explosive than ever. Most of all, he wasn’t going to be scared anymore. He would put himself on the market and take possession of his future.
Brandon closed that e-book with no approach to know that he’d simply written the preamble to a narrative too hokey for Hollywood. That he’d not solely make it to the NFL however play for his hometown crew, revolutionize professional soccer, and signal the largest contract a kicker has ever seen.
Brandon’s soccer expertise was apparent at age 6, when, simply to combine issues up throughout a recreation, he determined to arrange each single teammate for a objective as an alternative of scoring himself. At 13, he captained his age group for the Dallas Texans, the elite youth journey crew with whom he received titles as far-off as Sweden. By the time he graduated Plano Senior High, Brandon was 6-foot-3 with a sledgehammer of a proper leg, and he might learn the pitch as simply because the Sunday comics. He acquired many scholarship gives, however Notre Dame bought him on the schooling and an opportunity to play for Bobby Clark, a former Scottish worldwide.
He met Jenn at John Paul II High School in Plano throughout an area send-off occasion for incoming Notre Dame freshmen. The auditorium held about 25 youngsters and fogeys unfold throughout an area that sat 10 instances as many, which made Jenn elevate an eyebrow when Brandon plopped down within the seat subsequent to her, his mother in tow.
“Are you an athlete?” he requested her, with what she would come to perceive as very un-Brandon-like boldness. He guessed proper—she performed goalie in lacrosse—and each already knew from visits to campus that their groups would spend loads of time collectively. She was a bubbly Ursuline lady who couldn’t determine whether or not she wished to main in finance or Chinese, so she selected each. He was quiet and analytical, each bit the son of two engineers. But sandwiched between their moms within the sparsely crammed room, they felt drawn to each other, if not for a similar causes initially.
“I just made a friend,” she advised her greatest good friend.
“I just met my wife,” he advised his.
The afternoon earlier than their first day of school, Brandon invited Jenn to watch him play for the Fighting Irish soccer crew. She didn’t know the game nicely, however even she might grasp that few gamers would have the audacity to line up a shot from what felt like three ZIP codes past the penalty field, as he did earlier than whistling a ball that caromed off the crossbar and arrange a objective. She was awed, a lot in order that she made a degree of wanting up post-match protection to see if Clark commented on it. (He did.)
She additionally understood what his singular focus—to change into a professional soccer participant—meant for his or her relationship after Clark discouraged his prize recruit from courting throughout his first semester. By winter break, nevertheless, after he grew to become the one freshman to contribute on the primary nationwide championship crew in program historical past, he and Jenn had been an merchandise, and an even bigger on-field position was within the offing.
He began the subsequent three seasons at middle again, a place he tolerated greater than beloved, besides he completed his senior season because the Fighting Irish’s second-leading scorer and have become the primary Notre Dame participant in 4 years to rating thrice in a recreation.
Major League Soccer took discover. In 2017, Toronto FC, the league’s defending champion, chosen him within the first spherical of the annual MLS TremendousDraft. He draped the crew’s pink and white scarf over his navy blue go well with and flashed a winner’s smile.
The anxiousness set in when he reported to coaching. Here was Jozy Altidore, beginning striker for the U.S. Men’s National Team, and Michael Bradley, maybe one of the best American midfielder of all time. Brandon had rooted for them in World Cups; now he was their co-worker.
The crew was primed for an additional title run, and he stood to get extra alternatives on the reserve squad, Toronto FC II. He’d go down, acquire expertise, and are available again with some battle scars. Only it didn’t work out that approach. There had been two dozen Brandon Aubreys, prospects with little frequent floor other than a shared starvation for a thimbleful of alternatives on the subsequent stage. There was nobody to be taught from and never many extra to befriend.
He wasn’t lazy a lot as painfully unaware that those who made it had been shuttling from the pitch to the movie room to the burden room to the coaching desk and again to the pitch, as an alternative of going residence after follow and decompressing like he was. Just a few midseason coaching classes with Toronto’s primary roster woke him up to every part he wasn’t doing, however by then it was too late. He received handed up by gamers with much less pedigree however extra initiative, which plunged him into cerebral quicksand.
Toronto launched him on the finish of his rookie yr, and he latched on with Bethlehem Steel FC, the Philadelphia Union’s reserve crew. He had a greater go of it in suburban Pennsylvania, on a roster full of extra faculty soccer merchandise like him, however the membership folded on the finish of the subsequent season, and Brandon had a selection to make.
He and Jenn had been engaged since their senior yr at Notre Dame, and she or he was again in Dallas, making a profession pivot of her personal. Instead of pursuing finance, she had enrolled in flight college to change into a business airline pilot like her father. What sort of fiancé would he be if he determined to reside midway throughout the nation, make $35,000 a yr, and break up a shabby condominium with two roommates as an alternative of incomes shut to six figures as a software program engineer and sleeping below the identical roof as his soon-to-be spouse? “I don’t want to be the guy who’s chasing it at the expense of his family,” he concluded.
So in October 2018, Brandon got here residence. He and Jenn had been married in December; they purchased a home in Colleyville the next yr. He took her to dinners in Southlake and to watch sports activities at a bar in Grapevine. He performed board video games together with his mother and father, League of Legends together with his brother, and fantasy soccer in seven leagues. He learn Rich Dad Poor Dad. He made a LinkedIn web page. He knocked the rust off his programming expertise and took a job with GM Financial, which providers loans for General Motors. His efficiency opinions had been glowing.
It was the start of a great life. But when he gazed towards the longer term, what peered again at him appeared quite a bit like the current. “Dad, I don’t know how you’ve done this for 30 years,” Brandon advised his father, a fellow software program engineer. He was speaking concerning the work, and he was speaking concerning the years. He wanted one thing to try for, a approach to stave off the sameness. Luckily for him, his spouse had simply the factor.
On an NFL Sunday not lengthy after Brandon retired from soccer, because the couple watched a kicker make a area objective, prospects started to percolate in Jenn’s thoughts. Brandon says she was conscious that he “had a little mini crisis going on” and knew him nicely sufficient to perceive what a aggressive objective would possibly do for his spirits.
“You could do that,” she advised him, referring to the kicker. Brandon’s eyes flicked towards her, then again to the display screen, then to her once more.
“Do you know how much work it takes to be a pro athlete?” he requested.
“Yeah, I do,” she shot again. “I watched you do it.”
Most individuals would have let that thought flip to vapor, written it off as a enjoyable little bit of nonsense on a Sunday afternoon. Ryan Aubrey, Brandon’s older brother by practically three years, is for certain that Brandon would have been one among them had anybody aside from Jenn broached the topic. But Jenn “exhibited the kind of confidence in Brandon that I knew he probably had within himself but may not have necessarily been sure enough to express to the world,” Ryan says. “She could say it in a way that his brain interpreted, ‘Oh, I actually could do it.’ ”
The subsequent day, armed with a plastic soccer and tee they bought from a sporting items retailer, Brandon and Jenn had been on the athletic area at Colleyville Heritage High School. Brandon lined up dealing with the north finish zone. He knew the broad strokes of what to do. He was a large receiver rising up however moonlighted because the kicker, again when “I just thought it was something that somebody on the team had to do after scoring a touchdown,” he says.
But he had no body of reference for what he was able to as a grown man till his fourth try, when he blasted the ball by means of the uprights from practically midfield. Jenn, filming by the objective submit, captioned the video: “Pro soccer player turned kicker?! 62 yards!!!” It was enough proof that she could be onto one thing, if Brandon might discover somebody to polish up his potential.
Google pointed him within the course of Brian Egan, a 28-year-old who kicked collegiately at Mississippi State, the place he befriended the star quarterback, Dak Prescott. Egan, too, was chasing one thing. After faculty, he moved residence to small-town Alabama, the place he didn’t discover a lot ready for him.
“You feel like you’re on top of the world when you leave your hometown at 18,” he says. “You come back at 24, and it’s like, man, what am I supposed to do now?” The reply was to take an opportunity and transfer to Texas, the place he knew nobody however had a chance to get into teaching as a franchisee of One on One Kicking, which holds personal camps and tutoring classes for kickers. Egan shuttled between Dallas and Austin, slowly stacking purchasers and dealing actual property on the aspect.
He was about 4 years into that grind when a tall blond man approached him on a Saturday, in December 2018, at B.F. Phillips Community Park in Frisco. He was holding the dinkiest ball and tee Egan had ever seen—“laughable, if you look back at it now,” the coach says—and, not like Egan’s different purchasers that morning, he was nicely out of highschool. Nevertheless, Egan heard Brandon out and watched him kick just a few balls. He noticed a robust leg, lengthy levers, and never a lot else.
Egan thought-about the hurdles that lay in entrance of them. There was the transition from soccer to soccer, which was frequent for kickers however not simple. The former meant hanging a spherical object from variable angles and contact factors, whereas the latter concerned a repetitive movement and an rectangular ball with a candy spot the dimensions of a half-dollar.
What troubled Egan much more was the endgame. Even if he succeeded in molding Brandon right into a professional-caliber kicker, there was the matter of alternative. Brandon had exhausted his faculty eligibility, so he couldn’t begin over within the NCAA. That left 32 jobs to battle for within the NFL, the nation’s solely skilled soccer league on the time.
“I didn’t really have any expectations,” Brandon says. “I wanted to get as good as I could possibly get at it and then see if anybody would be willing to give me a shot. But I knew in the back of my head I was a long shot, and that it’s probably not going to happen.” He and Egan made a pact: take it just a few months at a time, then reassess. Brandon would preserve going so long as they noticed progress.
Three days per week, he was off the bed by 5:30 am to hit the gymnasium earlier than commuting to Arlington for work. He’d be within the workplace at 7 and be out by 3:30 to make it to Frisco with sufficient daylight to kick with Egan, whose first orders of enterprise had been to set up a pre-snap routine—three steps again, two over, identical beginning spot each time—and implement a repeatable supply.
Weekend afternoons had been spent at Colleyville Heritage. Brandon upgraded from his plastic soccer to 4 NFL-licensed pigskins, which retailed for greater than $150 apiece. Jenn’s activity was to shag the balls earlier than they hit the observe surrounding the sphere, as a result of her husband struck them with such pressure that they might pop on influence. After jamming just a few fingers, she dug up her outdated lacrosse stick.
The routines soothed his engineer’s mind. There was at all times one thing out of attain in soccer, one other tactic to shore up or ability he was poor in. Here, although, every part was black and white. Make or miss. Right spot or fallacious.
“For some people, it can be pretty boring or monotonous,” he says. “For me, it was kind of a relief because I knew exactly what I needed to do to become the best kicker I could be.”
Then, close to tragedy. In September 2019, Jenn was working a contract gig as a flight teacher when she skilled an excruciating ache on the aspect of her cranium, “like someone was stabbing me with a knife over and over.” Somehow she landed the airplane—her pupil wasn’t superior sufficient to take over—and a good friend rushed her to the hospital, the place scans revealed a bleeding mass in her mind. Doctors advised her she’d suffered a stroke extreme sufficient, had the mass been situated in the identical spot on the other aspect of her mind, it could have compelled her to relearn how to stroll, discuss, learn, and write. Instead, as soon as it was surgically eliminated, she walked away with no unwanted side effects.
Safety protocols, nevertheless, demanded that Jenn cease flying till she handed 5 years of neurological checks, which put her out of a job. It was on Brandon to preserve them afloat. The Aubreys had simply closed on the home in Colleyville per week earlier than the accident and had been nonetheless paying lease on an condominium. Egan’s month-to-month kicking charges had been neck and neck with their new mortgage. “I really can’t be wasting my money right now,” Brandon advised his coach, “but I want to keep doing this if it’s going to get somewhere.”
By then, Egan had come to see one thing in Brandon. He appeared like an NFL kicker, having crammed out his rangy body with all these hours within the gymnasium, and he had begun to kick like one, too, booting the kind of clear, rotating balls that particular groups coaches swoon over. Now it was a matter of constant to flip him from a expertise right into a technician. “We can get somewhere,” Egan assured him.
They pressed on. When the pandemic hit, Brandon ramped up because the world shut down. He taped strains in his storage to match his pre-kick routine and practiced his steps 100 instances every day. When B.F. Phillips’ uprights had been eliminated, he kicked at a lamppost. One night time, he, Egan, and one other kicker went to Frisco’s Warren Sports Complex. Brandon was nonetheless recovering from a current hip surgical procedure, however Egan’s different protégé hoped to sneak in a spherical of kicks. They had been met by a visitor: Prescott, who by then was the face of the Cowboys and bored mindless within the early days of COVID-19. He advised his outdated good friend Egan that he wished to make the opposite kicker some cash, so he challenged the man to 10 makes an attempt at spots of his selecting. Hit eight, and QB1 would give him $200. The man couldn’t do it. Brandon couldn’t resist and determined to strive his luck. He drilled 9 and went residence with cash in his pocket and a narrative to inform, questioning whether or not that will be his closest brush with the NFL.
Midway by means of 2020, a yr and a half into coaching, Egan determined that Brandon was prepared for the subsequent step. It was time to enter the world of showcases, paid occasions the place an entry charge gave him entry to kick in entrance of coaches, scouts, and ex-NFL gamers who had the ear of entrance places of work.
Brandon’s first occasion was in San Diego, run by former NFL kicker Nick Novak. Brandon took the primary flight out and, ever the introvert, tried to ignore the trim, bald seatmate keen to strike up a dialog with him. But Jeff Guenzburger broke him on the descent. When Guenzburger discovered why Brandon was on the town, he revealed that he knew Nick Novak; Guenzburger overlapped with him on the San Diego Chargers, the place he spent 4 years as a chaplain assistant. Better nonetheless, Guenzburger knew John Carney, who kicked within the NFL till he was 46 years outdated and ran showcases of his personal in better San Diego.
Guenzburger mentioned he could be glad to dealer an introduction, in addition to give Brandon a journey to his resort. Too bewildered to say no, Brandon agreed, then wound up having lunch with Guenzburger and his household when the resort room wasn’t prepared. By the tip of the day, Guenzburger had supplied up his visitor room and use of a automotive each time Brandon wished to come into city to compete, no questions requested.
“My wife would tell you a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet,” Guenzburger says. “I kind of say, ‘Alright, Lord, who do you want me to help today?’ And that morning, it just happened to be Brandon.”
Buoyed by a spot to keep and free airfare by the use of Jenn’s new job in pilot recruiting, Brandon started making common journeys out west. Guenzburger received him in with Carney, whose knowledge furnished the home Egan constructed. Brandon folded into Carney’s coaching classes, the place he labored alongside the category of kicker he’d rival for job alternatives. He realized as soon as and for all that he belonged, after which some.
The evaluators on the showcase circuit agreed. But after attending a dozen or so occasions, the fallacious sort of sample started to emerge. “Teams kept telling me the same thing over and over again: you look good, but you don’t have any film, and we don’t know if you can do this,” Brandon says. “I felt like I was banging my head against the wall.”
He was trapped, needing movie to get a job and a job to get movie. Then his break got here from a most sudden place. Forty years in the past, the United States Football League was the closest anybody had ever come to a real complement to the NFL. In 1983 and ’84, the USFL carved out a distinct segment as a spring soccer league that captured the eye of soccer followers starved for motion between NFL seasons, even out-recruiting the NFL for family names reminiscent of Herschel Walker, Reggie White, and Steve Young. A delusional concept to compete towards the NFL within the fall brought about the league’s collapse in 1986, however the USFL’s cultural imprint was robust sufficient that each few years a brand new spring startup rolled round, making an attempt to replicate the magic—and viewers—of soccer in flip-flop climate.
In 2022, the most recent spring league was none aside from the USFL itself, set to be resurrected below the management of president Daryl “Moose” Johnston, the fullback from the Cowboys’ Nineties dynasty groups. This time, the USFL could be a developmental league, a approach for small-time names with massive NFL desires to get a foothold and hopefully get boosted towards the sport’s peak.
This was Brandon’s final, greatest likelihood. He had carried out nicely sufficient to make the pool of kickers eligible for choice by eight groups. At 9 am on February 23, 2022, he and Jenn hunkered down of their residence workplace for the draft’s second day. He saved one monitor devoted to the day’s work at GM Financial; the opposite was locked on Twitter. Then he watched different names come off the board. The Michigan Panthers, who picked third, handed on taking a kicker completely. The Pittsburgh Maulers did the identical two spots later. Jenn watched her husband’s eyes water as two extra groups picked kickers who weren’t him. She had by no means seen him so dejected. Neither of them mentioned a phrase.
Their remaining hope was the Birmingham Stallions. Before the draft, Brandon had requested Jenn which crew she thought would possibly draft him. She scanned the checklist of head coaches and observed that the Stallions’ was Skip Holtz, a former Notre Dame participant and the son of legendary Irish coach Lou Holtz. “I think Birmingham is going to take you because Skip is a Notre Dame guy,” she mentioned. “That makes no sense,” he replied. “They don’t make decisions like that based on a helmet.”
Unbeknownst to them, Holtz had positioned a name to Carney. The two had been outdated teammates at Notre Dame, and Holtz, who doubled as Birmingham’s common supervisor, had no qualms deferring to a good friend who knew the kicking pool much better. He listened as Carney ran down the deserves of a half-dozen names. Past these, Carney advised him, there’s somebody who could possibly be higher than all of them.
No, Carney acknowledged, Brandon Aubrey had not performed in a recreation, however he possessed enormous pure expertise, clear mechanics, robust character, and had performed soccer at Notre Dame. “As soon as the words ‘Notre Dame’ came out of my mouth, I could hear the wheels turning in Skip’s head,” Carney says.
Indeed, admits Holtz, “I kind of fell in love with Brandon because of the Notre Dame connection between myself, John, and him.” But when the Stallions’ decide rolled round, a number of of the highest six names on Carney’s checklist had been nonetheless out there. The pragmatic factor could be to select the recognized commodity, like so many others had as an alternative of Brandon. Holtz didn’t need to be pragmatic. “At this point, I’m in it emotionally,” he says. “I’m taking Brandon Aubrey.”
Back in Colleyville, Brandon jumped out of his chair, arms raised towards the ceiling. “They picked me!” he shouted. “They picked me!”
“That,” Jenn says, “is the happiest I’ve ever seen him.”
Brandon Aubrey dressed for his first skilled soccer recreation in a Sheraton convention room partitioned into eight sections. He practiced a few of his first professional area targets on a soccer area with out uprights, needing teammates to elevate their arms to present him the place to goal. Between reps, he and his fellow specialists performed the position of apparatus staffers, doing every part from hauling dummies onto the sphere to shagging balls to establishing JUGS machines.
Glamorous the USFL was not, however Brandon threw himself in full bore. Though he had no assured contract and the league’s common season solely ran from April by means of June, he put in his two weeks’ discover at GM Financial the day the Stallions drafted him. Still, the enormity of all of it didn’t hit him till he stepped onto the sphere for the league’s inaugural kickoff.
He positioned the ball on the tee, raised his head, and got here to a realization: “Oh, there are other people out here.” More than 17,000 of them, actually, which made his legs shake. It would take one other 4 video games to shed his nerves. He completed the yr with 18 made area targets in 22 makes an attempt because the Stallions received the league’s inaugural championship.
Brandon had entered skilled soccer as an afterthought, and he exited his first season on the All-USFL crew, prompting three NFL franchises to work him out. So when he returned to Birmingham for his second season, he was optimistic that his likelihood on the massive time would quickly come. And come it did.
The Cowboys had entered the spring of 2023 in determined want of a kicker, and then-special groups coach John Fassel, a 52-year-old whose renown is as massive as his jovial persona, meant to fill it by way of the NFL Draft, the place he had recognized two thrilling prospects. When each received snapped up in entrance of Dallas, Fassel had to get inventive.
He determined to use the USFL for what it was meant and see if anybody was prepared to catch a break. That’s how he received to watching tape of Brandon’s 80-yard kickoffs. Fassel brokered an introduction by textual content and flew incognito to Birmingham to see him kick in individual in June; Fassel’s cowl was damaged when an in-arena digital camera noticed him and put him up on the jumbotron. A 15-minute postgame dialog with Brandon, Jenn, and Brandon’s mother and father concluded with a message: stick with it, and also you’ll have an invitation to Cowboys coaching camp.
Brandon was floored. Dallas wasn’t even his solely provide; the Washington Commanders made a powerful method and supplied $85,000 extra out of the gate. But his solely competitors for the job in Dallas was Tristan Vizcaino, who additionally hadn’t kicked in an NFL recreation and who Fassel says now was “kind of a spot holder.” And it was the Cowboys, the crew Brandon and his household had rooted for since Jeff and Donna Aubrey relocated to Plano in 1996. There was no determination to be made.
One month later, he arrived in Oxnard, California, and unpacked his issues in an actual locker room, full of gamers he as soon as rostered on his fantasy soccer groups. Prescott, three years faraway from paying him $200 on a lark, made a degree to cease by kicking drills every day and shout a message of encouragement. It took every part Brandon had not to succumb to the imposter syndrome that value him so dearly in Toronto.
“If you fail here, you’ll be fine,” he advised himself.
At first it appeared like he would possibly. Oxnard was a brutal place to kick—barely above sea stage, with swirling winds. Neither he nor Vizcaino might get right into a rhythm, and splitting the follow reps wasn’t serving to both get nearer. So the Cowboys doubled down, slicing Vizcaino unfastened.
In the preseason finale, Brandon trotted on to try a 59-yard area objective within the first quarter. It was a take a look at he wasn’t certain he might move, a full 10 yards deeper than his profession lengthy within the USFL. He kicked it laborious sufficient, however the ball sailed broad left. Then, two quarters later, he received a redo from the identical spot on the sphere. This time he hit it true. “We got ourselves a kicker!” Jerry Jones crowed on his weekly radio present.
No one realized just how good of one yet. Brandon missed his very first common season kick, an additional level try that got here after a sudden changeover from protection to offense. Sitting within the stands, his mom set free a shriek. “Oh, God, please don’t take this away from him,” Donna begged. But Brandon recovered to make each of his area objective makes an attempt that day. Then he hit all 5 the subsequent week. By the time week 9 rolled round, he was 18 of 18 on the season and one kick away from breaking the document for many consecutive-made area targets to start an NFL profession. He received his likelihood in Philadelphia towards the hated Eagles, from 51 yards out, right into a rightward-blowing wind.
“If this kid makes this kick, we’ve got something unbelievable on our hands,” Fassel muttered to himself. Brandon piped it, and nothing would ever be the identical.
That week, he received acknowledged in public for the primary time, when a waiter at one among his and Jenn’s favourite Mexican spots blurted out, “You’re Brandon Aubrey!” earlier than they might even get their drink order in. Then a half-dozen extra individuals approached the desk. The area targets saved coming, and his star saved rising. Post Malone, an artist he and Jenn had been listening to since Notre Dame, carried out a present in Brandon’s blue and white No. 17, extraordinary shine for the place usually thought to be the nerds on the jock desk. After video games, followers started flocking to his outdated black Ford Escape nestled in between the unique vehicles and jacked-up vans. That’s the place the participant not so totally different from them was at all times glad to signal and pose upon arrival.
He and Jenn felt like vacationers that complete first yr. “Is this real life?” they’d ask one another throughout automotive rides residence from AT&T Stadium. He didn’t miss his first area objective till the final recreation of the common season, by which level he’d doubled the document he broke in Philadelphia, together with main the NFL in scoring and turning into a first-team All-Pro, the league’s highest honor at his place. It was the best rookie yr by a kicker in league historical past.
“I didn’t know your son was that good,” one among Jeff Aubrey’s co-workers advised him on the workplace. “Neither did I,” he replied.
Midway by means of Brandon’s third yr, he grew to become the primary participant ever to make three 60-yard area targets in a season. By season’s finish, he held the league document for many made 60-yard area targets in a profession. Cowboys lengthy snapper Trent Sieg claims the kicker’s true vary is 85 yards, which could possibly be whole bullshit—solely we’re speaking about Brandon Aubrey.
The stress has change into intense. It was a speaking level when Brandon missed a collection of kicks from past 50 yards late final yr, a zone as soon as thought-about to be a coin flip. “He brought his game to such heights that if he misses a 56-yarder, it’s like, ‘Oh, he’s lost a step,’ ” Fassel says. “You realize what you guys are expecting him to do all the time?”
The remainder of the NFL has begun to anticipate the identical from its kickers, too. In 2014, solely 5 regular-season kicks had been tried from past 60 yards. None had been profitable. In 2024, the yr after Aubrey’s historic rookie season, 4 kickers transformed on 15 makes an attempt. Last yr, kickers went 12 of twenty-two. The NFL is in a leg race, which has been attributed to every part from higher coaching to rule and tools modifications. But Sieg believes the best catalyst is a person. Kickers are making greater kicks than they ever have as a result of Brandon proved it was doable.
“It’s like the guy who was the first to run a mile in under four minutes,” Sieg says. “No one did it. And then as soon as someone was able to show ‘Hey, we can do this, and we can be pretty successful at it,’ then all of a sudden everybody’s doing it.
“Brandon has changed the game.”
Kicking is a lonely career, practiced by males locked inside their very own heads. Brandon’s contemporaries within the NFL know nothing aside from that stress and the concern of what unknown would possibly await if a foul run of kicks ended every part. It’s the price of dwelling their dream.
But Brandon grew up on a distinct dream, misplaced it, and survived. The weight he shoulders is lighter than everybody else’s, even enjoying for the Cowboys, the NFL’s most scrutinized crew. It’s how he doesn’t buckle within the face of what seems like unimaginable expectations.
“He’s the right guy to handle this city, this moment, this pressure,” says Egan, his first kicking coach, now completed sufficient to run his personal kicking enterprise. “You would never have thought we’d get here, so now he can play free and just run with it.”
Still, Brandon spent his third NFL season dwelling like an anvil hung over his head, all too conscious that regression might blow his likelihood at monetary safety as he headed into restricted free company. Once the Cowboys had been eradicated from the playoffs, contract negotiations consumed him. More than as soon as, Jenn awoke in the course of the night time to discover him on his laptop computer, constructing an Excel spreadsheet to calculate what greenback quantity would make sure that they; their 1-year-old son, Colton; and their future kids would need for nothing. He obtained the contracts of the 2 kickers who reset the pay scale earlier than him, and he combed by means of each line of wonderful print.
Brandon’s agent, Todd France, additionally represented Prescott, whose final negotiation with the Cowboys stretched to the eve of the NFL season. The quarterback walked away with the biggest contract in NFL historical past, and France believed that Brandon might obliterate the pay scale for kickers if he dug in equally laborious.
Brandon didn’t have the abdomen for that. He and Jenn had outgrown the home in Colleyville and wished to construct a brand new one, however building couldn’t get underway till he knew how a lot cash he had within the financial institution. He took issues into his personal arms and started urgent either side to get a deal finished, “something I would not have done and did not do as a soccer player,” he says.
The official phrase got here down at The Star in April, halfway by means of a tuneup session with Egan. Jenn, seven months pregnant with their second youngster, appeared on. Colton toddled on the artificial grass. Chris Stapleton, Brandon’s go-to kicking music, blared over his cellphone speaker till the nation singer’s raspy tenor was preempted by a name from France asserting {that a} deal was prepared to be signed that afternoon—a document four-year, $28 million contract, which made Brandon the first kicker to earn a $7 million salary.
Celebrating with the girl who gave him a brand new dream and the person who introduced it to actuality, Brandon felt a heaviness soften away. “Cinematic,” Jenn calls it.
So was the second that got here just a few hours later, after signatures had been pressed onto paper. The Aubreys had been heading again to their automotive when Brandon paused on the follow area. He gazed on the uprights, their yellow end lit up by fluorescent lights, and pictured his future. At final, he appreciated what he noticed.
“You know what, Jenn?” he mentioned. “For the first time in a long time, that looks like fun.”
Write to [email protected].
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Mike Piellucci
Mike Piellucci is D Magazine‘s sports activities editor. He is a former staffer at The Athletic and VICE, and his freelance work has been featured in The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Los Angeles Magazine and The Ringer. A Dallas native, he’s a graduate of Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas and the University of Southern California. He’s an enormous fan of Star Wars and Johnny Cash.