Aubrey’s latest spotlight comes from the Cowboys’ Spanish-language social channel, Somos Cowboys, which recently shared a video featuring Aubrey tackling a series of soccer-style skills challenges on the practice field. The clip, captioned “Testing Brandon Aubrey’s skills,” showcases him performing footwork drills and ball-control exercises while wearing socks, with a host prompting him through several tasks. It captures Aubrey reacting to how his touch has evolved since returning to the sport, including a moment where he describes a drill as something he once “hated.” The footage underscores the technical side of the sport he grew up playing before turning his attention to football.
The training scenes unfold on the Cowboys’ Frisco, Texas practice complex, the same facility where Aubrey now handles field goals rather than tackles. His background as a soccer player runs deep: he spent four years as a center back at Notre Dame and even explored a professional soccer career before football entered the picture.
Aubrey’s soccer résumé is substantial. At Notre Dame, he started 63 of 76 games, helped the team win a national championship as a freshman in 2013, and earned first-team All-ACC honors. His talents led Toronto FC to select him 21st overall in the 2017 MLS SuperDraft. He spent that season with Toronto FC’s reserve squad and later played for Bethlehem Steel FC. After being released in 2018, Aubrey stepped away from professional soccer to pursue a career as a software engineer—a path unrelated to football. That changed when his wife encouraged him to reconsider his athletic future after watching him kick a bottle across a yard, a moment that reignited his interest in kicking professionally.
Aubrey eventually returned to competition as a kicker and trained with a private kicking coach before joining the USFL’s Birmingham Stallions, where he helped lead the team to back-to-back championships. His NFL arc began in 2023 with the Dallas Cowboys, and he quickly established himself as one of the league’s most productive kickers. In his rookie NFL season, he earned first-team All-Pro recognition, led the league in field goals for the year, and set a league record with 14 made field goals from 50 yards or longer in 2024.
Through three seasons with Dallas, Aubrey has connected on 112 of 127 field goals, including 35 of 44 from beyond 50 yards. His 65-yard field goal against the Baltimore Ravens stands as one of the longest in NFL history, tying for the fourth-longest kick ever recorded. In April, the Cowboys formalized their commitment with Aubrey by signing him to a four-year, $28 million extension, which includes $20 million guaranteed and positions him as the highest-paid kicker in NFL history.
In summary, Aubrey’s ascent—from Notre Dame to the MLS, a detour into software engineering, a return to professional soccer, and finally a transformative NFL career with the Cowboys—illustrates how diverse athletic backgrounds can culminate in top-tier performance on football’s biggest stage.
