From 9-to-5 to the NFL: Brandon Aubrey's incredible journey to the Dallas Cowboys
On a warm September day in 2019, Brian Egan pulled up to a sprawling sports complex in the Dallas suburbs. The part-time kicking coach had organized a free clinic for aspiring kickers who lived nearby.
As the participants arrived, Egan quickly recognized that one stood out from his usual teenaged clientele. Warming up alongside more than a dozen high school and middle school kickers was a tall, strapping newcomer with a grown man’s face and physique.
“That guy doesn’t look like he’s in high school,” Egan remembers thinking.
So Egan introduced himself and asked the newcomer about himself.
Brandon Aubrey told Egan that he played college soccer at Notre Dame, that Toronto FC had drafted him 21st overall in 2017 and that his pro career had stalled after two underwhelming seasons in an MLS feeder league. Even though Aubrey had recently taken a 9-to-5 job as a software engineer, the 24-year-old couldn’t shake the lingering suspicion that he was meant to do something else. Lately, he’d begun to wonder if kicking a football might be his calling. He’d searched on Google for Dallas-area kicking coaches, and Egan was the top result.
Egan needed to watch Aubrey kick a football only a few times that day to realize that the former pro soccer player had unusual talent. The ball exploded off Aubrey’s foot. He had, as Egan puts it, “natural ball-striking ability.”
At the end of that training session, Aubrey asked Egan, “Do you think I’m any good at this, or do you think I’m wasting my time?”
Egan answered candidly. He acknowledged that Aubrey showed real promise. Then he laid out how difficult it would be for Aubrey to land one of the NFL’s 32 kicking jobs without any football experience in high school or college.
“He told me he was willing to put in the work,” Egan told Yahoo Sports. “Once he said that, we just came up with a plan and started rocking and rolling.”
Little did Egan know how far his strong-legged new pupil would go. Just four years later, Aubrey is one of the Dallas Cowboys’ most valuable players. He has already shattered the record for consecutive made field goals to start an NFL career, and he is poised to blow past the record for most touchbacks in a season.
“Everyone has their own unique story,” Aubrey told reporters earlier this season.
But few NFL players have one as remarkable as his.
The transition from soccer to football
If Brandon Aubrey were going to break records as a professional athlete, he long assumed it would be on the soccer pitch. He excelled as an attacker growing up in Plano, Texas, transitioned to center back at Notre Dame and blossomed into a cerebral defender who was a comfortable passer out of the back and an aerial threat to score on set pieces.
Hailed as a likely top-10 pick entering the 2017 MLS Draft, Aubrey slipped after a poor showing during agility testing at the pre-draft combine. Concerns about his lack of quickness defending forwards in tight spaces caused him to slip to MLS Cup runner-up Toronto with the second-to-last pick in the first round.
While Toronto FC general manager Tim Bezbatchenko touted Aubrey on draft night as being able to contribute in MLS “sooner rather than later,” the franchise appeared to gradually lose faith in its first-round pick. Aubrey spent his rookie year playing in the second-tier U.S. Soccer League with Toronto FC’s reserve team while the big club won the MLS Cup. He joined Bethlehem Steel FC in 2018, but the franchise dissolved at the end of the season.
Newly married and making a modest salary, Aubrey walked away from other USL opportunities. The computer science major updated his LinkedIn profile and took a job as a software engineer with GM Financial at the company’s office in Arlington, Texas.
Aubrey might still have a badge and cubicle were it not for an offhand remark from his wife while they were watching football together. Jenn lit a spark in Aubrey when a kicker trotted onto the field to attempt a field goal and she told her husband that he could do that.
That’s what led Aubrey to take up kicking again for the first time since his days on the football team at Schimelpfenig Middle School. And that’s what led Aubrey to show up to Egan’s free clinic and formulate a training plan.
Three or four nights a week, Aubrey would leave work in Arlington, drive 40 miles to Frisco and train with Egan for up to two hours. Sometimes it would be at a city park or a local middle school or high school. In 2020, when those venues closed at the height of the COVID pandemic, Egan brought Aubrey to a grassy field and had him take aim at light poles.
Recalled Egan with a laugh, “I figured, ‘Hey, if he can hit a pole, he can make it through the uprights.’”
When pandemic restrictions began to loosen, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott made a surprise appearance at one of Aubrey’s training sessions with Egan. Prescott and Egan were college teammates at Mississippi State and have remained close friends ever since.
Hoping to add some pressure, Prescott challenged Aubrey and another kicker to make as many field goals as they could from distances that he chose. The other kicker went first. He converted eight. Then it was Aubrey’s turn. He made nine.
“I may still owe him $200,” Prescott said last week. “I don't know if I had it on me at the time.”
Two years into Aubrey’s training, Egan had seen enough. He pulled Aubrey aside and told him, “I’ve done all I can to get you ready to perform at a high level.”
Now it was time for Aubrey to start traveling to free-agent kicking showcases and see where he stood amongst other NFL hopefuls.
The USFL takes a chance on Aubrey
In February 2022, former NFL kicker John Carney received a call from an old college teammate at Notre Dame. Birmingham Stallions coach Skip Holtz reached out to Carney seeking input on which kickers to target in the inaugural USFL Draft later that month.
Carney listed a half-dozen kickers who had impressed him at the USFL’s specialist showcase, guys with long track records of high school and college success. Those sounded like promising options to Holtz, but the Stallions had the eighth pick of free-agent kickers. As a result, Holtz asked Carney, “What do I do if those guys are all gone?”
It was then that Carney at last mentioned the other kicker who had wowed him, a former Notre Dame soccer player with a strong leg and steely demeanor but no football experience. Carney told Holtz that Aubrey “may be the best of all of them if he can handle game pressure.”
To Holtz, the beauty of the USFL was the freedom to give opportunities to guys who might not get them in the NFL. The more Holtz thought about Carney’s comments, the more he wanted to take a flier on Aubrey no matter which other kickers were available.
“What do I have to lose?” Holtz remembers thinking. “I have the chance to have the best guy drafting eighth. Let’s roll the dice.”
The sound the ball made coming off Aubrey’s foot was Holtz’s first indication that he made the right decision. The Stallions practiced for two weeks on a field with no uprights, but Holtz came away convinced that Aubrey was special.
When Aubrey didn’t flinch in the face of game pressure, Holtz grew only more confident in his kicker. In 2022, Aubrey made 18 of 22 field-goal attempts and 22 of 24 extra points. The next season, Aubrey converted 14 of 15 field goals and all 35 extra points.
“You really have to give Skip Holtz and Birmingham credit for taking a chance,” Carney told Yahoo Sports. “Some teams will not take that risk. They want game film. They want to see what a guy looks like under game pressure or during the course of a season. Then there’s coaches and management like Birmingham. I was very proud and pleased that they took a risk on a player who was talented and just needed a shot.”
The NFL finally calls
No longer unproven in game situations, Aubrey began drawing attention from NFL teams in need of a kicker. Among those were the Cowboys, who had soured on former starter Brett Maher after he missed four of five extra-point attempts during a playoff victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers the previous season.
Dallas special-teams coordinator John Fassel began watching Aubrey’s USFL game film shortly before last April’s NFL Draft. When the top two college kicking prospects came off the board earlier than the Cowboys were comfortable taking them, the front office pivoted to scouring the free-agent market.
Fassel struck up a text relationship with Aubrey, showed up to a Birmingham Stallions game incognito and visited with Aubrey’s family afterward. He left most impressed with the way that Aubrey boomed kickoffs to the goal line, even though USFL kickoffs were from the 20-yard line.
When Aubrey tried out for the Cowboys in early July, they signed him right away. As Fassel told reporters earlier this month, “We didn’t want him to go try out anywhere else.”
It didn’t take long for Aubrey to win a training camp battle with fellow kicker Tristan Vizcaino and become Dallas’ starter. The Cowboys released Vizcaino in early August and opted not to sign a veteran free agent such as Robbie Gould or Mason Crosby.
Out of nowhere, Aubrey was the kicker for the Dallas Cowboys, the team he grew up watching with his family on Sundays. The former soccer player and software engineer seized his opportunity, helping propel Dallas into a first-place tie with Philadelphia atop the NFC East by connecting on all 31 field goals he has attempted and 40 of 43 extra points.
The most pressure-packed game of the Cowboys’ season also doubled as Aubrey’s finest performance. He hit four field goals in Dallas’ 33-13 victory over Philadelphia earlier this month, including kicks from 50, 59 and 60 yards.
Afterward, Fassel praised Aubrey’s “incredibly natural swing” and his poise in big moments.
“I haven’t really had to coach Brandon Aubrey,” the special-teams coach marveled. “I haven’t done anything.”
While Aubrey’s story is unique among today’s NFL kickers, some around the league expect that to change if he continues to excel. Former NFL kicker Nick Novak, now a private kicking coach and showcase host, expects other minor-league professional soccer players to begin attempting to emulate Aubrey’s transition as soon as this offseason.
“He should be an inspiration for all those guys,” Novak told Yahoo Sports. “He’s having one of the best seasons of any kicker in NFL history. He’s making something difficult look really, really easy.”
Yahoo Sports Senior NFL Reporter Jori Epstein contributed to this story.
