PLANO, Texas — Brandon Aubrey says he doesn’t want to imagine what his parents are thinking before he kicks a field goal. Any thought of their nerves might mess with his head, and the Dallas Cowboys can’t spare his focus.
It’s no matter. Jeff and Donna Aubrey’s Plano living room is mostly filled with confidence on game days.
“He’s really level-headed,” Jeff Aubrey said of his son. “He’s grounded. He knows what he’s doing and I think he’s going to have a long career kicking.”
Technically, Aubrey’s football career will be shorter than most NFL kickers’ no matter how long he plays professionally. He didn’t play football in college or high school.
Before the USFL’s Birmingham Stallions drafted him in 2022, Aubrey hadn’t kicked in a competitive football game since middle school.
“10-year-old me was a wide receiver when he was playing football and thought, ‘That’s a real position,’” Aubrey said. “I didn’t understand that kicking a football was a job that you could do and make money doing.”
Coaches in every sport wanted Aubrey’s talents. He was well-coordinated for a tall child, his mom says.
So young Brandon tried football, baseball, soccer, basketball and roller hockey.
Brandon’s little league baseball coach left him on the team’s roster even after he’d quit the sport. But Aubrey agreed to fill in for an injured player in the championship game, Donna recalled.
Even after he cleared the bases on a walk-off hit, he told his mother the sport was too boring to continue.
By high school, Aubrey had quit all other extracurricular activities to focus on soccer. He’d decided at 5 or 6 years old he’d play professionally, his parents say.
“School and soccer was all I did growing up,” Aubrey said.
As an elementary schooler, he chose to train five days each week. No one discouraged his ambitions.
“When Brandon sets his mind on something, he does it,” Donna said.
Aubrey graduated from Plano High School and joined Notre Dame’s soccer team. His team promptly won a national championship.
Major League Soccer’s Toronto FC selected Aubrey the first round of the 2017 draft. The team had just won the MLS Cup, along with two other significant trophies.
The MLS team was deep at Brandon’s position, so it loaned the rookie to Toronto’s United Soccer League team.
He lived in Toronto for two years. His wife was not able to secure a work visa to join Brandon in Canada.
“I wasn’t making a lot of money doing it,” he said. “I’d just gotten married, so I didn’t really want to keep traveling and be underpaid.”
Aubrey hung up the soccer cleats after a brief stint playing for another United Soccer League team in Pennsylvania.
In 2018, Aubrey moved back to Dallas-Fort Worth and accepted a job as a software engineer. He’d earned a degree in the field at Notre Dame, where he graduated a semester early.
Aubrey’s 'home life' lasted about four months.
“I watched NFL football on Sundays,” he said. “Occasionally, my wife would join me.”
“One Sunday, we saw some kickers and she said, ‘You know, you really could do that,’” Aubrey continued. “I thought, ‘You’re crazy. They put a lot of work and effort into that. It’s not just something any soccer player can just go out and do.’”
She implored him to try anyway. They went to a field at Colleyville-Heritage with a ball and a kicking tee.
“At first, it started off as a way to kill an afternoon,” Aubrey said. “But when I saw the ball come off my foot and the flight it took, I’m like, ‘Oh, maybe I can do this.’”
Aubrey said he gradually moved the ball further back to “the rangers most NFL kickers would max out at and saw I had that distance in me.”
He hired a kicking specialist and began training a few days each week after work. Aubrey says he went to his first session, unaware it was actually a camp for middle and high school kickers.
“You know, I’m a little bit older than them at the time,” he laughed.
“I knew I had the ability,” Aubrey continued. “I just needed somebody to give me an opportunity.”
“I always thought, you know, ‘Go for it,’” Donna Aubrey said. “If you don’t try, you’ll never get it. And now you’re young and you don’t have a whole lot to lose. You can get your job back. Go for it.’”
But the kicker’s success was far from guaranteed. The USFL and XFL did not yet exist. Aubrey did not want to return to Canada and play in the CFL.
“It was NFL or bust for me when I first started,” he said.
Aubrey attended kicking circuits and camps for two years, leveraging relationships he’d formed at Notre Dame to garner scouts’ attention.
NFL executives were impressed with his leg, but unwilling to sign a player who’d never kicked in a meaningful game.
That changed after the USFL’s Stallions drafted Aubrey. Brandon took a 50 percent pay cut to return to professional sports.
Statistically, he was the spring league’s best kicker for two seasons.
Pining for a consistent kicker, the Dallas Cowboys invited Aubrey to training camp. He wasn’t immediately successful. Oxnard is notoriously hard on specialists.
“I just didn’t realize people could be so mean,” Donna said of fans who heckled kickers at the camp and on social media. “Who would boo a kid like that?”
Still, Aubrey secured the starting job. After missing his first extra point in the regular season opener, the rookie is off to an historically accurate start.
“I just hope he keeps it up,” Jeff said. “It’s great seeing him out there. He’s got a huge smile on his face.”
Aubrey says his life hasn’t changed much since he won the job, though his parents acknowledge he’s probably too focused to notice subtle changes.
Jeff and Donna used their vacation days to see Brandon’s USFL games in the spring. They watch road games from their Plano living room. Sometimes, neighbors come to watch.
When they attend games at AT&T Stadium, they say they sometimes struggle to see whether Brandon’s kicks are successful.
“Can the referees just announce it a bit sooner?” Donna pleaded, with a smile.
Brandon jokes his 10-year-old self would probably be disappointed his soccer career didn’t turn out, though he acknowledges he accomplished at least one career goal.
There’s more work to do, though.
“If you ever feel like you’ve arrived, I feel like you’re going to quickly be humbled,” he said.