Notre Dame Soccer to Dallas’ Golden Leg: Brandon Aubrey’s Unbelievable Journey
- Connor Regan
- Sep 17
- 7 min read
The Notre Dame alumnus turned late-blooming kicker has gone from obscurity to stardom, rewriting his story with every clutch kick.
Brandon Aubrey is the kind of story you almost want to fact-check before you buy into it, because it sounds too far-fetched to be real. Here is a man who once played center back for Notre Dame soccer, a man who was drafted into Major League Soccer, who left the sport and went to work as a software engineer, who trained alone on football fields at night until his leg was sharp enough to win championships in the USFL, and who now finds himself as the starting kicker for the Dallas Cowboys. If you told it around a table, it would sound like a tall tale stitched together from five different careers. Yet there he was on a Sunday night in Arlington, striding onto the turf with a game on the line, and striking the ball so cleanly that it carried sixty-four yards through the uprights as the clock hit zero.
That kick came against the Giants on September 14th, and it was the sort of moment that lingers. The Cowboys had been on the verge of defeat, but Aubrey gave them life with a swing of his right leg that forced overtime and turned the stadium into a roar. Ten minutes later, in overtime, he lined up again and buried a forty-six-yarder that ended the game outright. The NFL honored him as the Special Teams Player of the Week, and it wasn’t the first time they’d done so. Through two weeks of the 2025 season, he has not missed a kick, six for six on field goals, six for six on extra points, the longest of them all a sixty-four-yard shot that felt like something out of a video game. This from a player who, not long ago, was working nine to five in an office, the sound of keyboards in his ears instead of the hum of a stadium.
To understand how improbable this is, you have to go back to where it began. Aubrey grew up in Plano, Texas, a suburb north of Dallas, where his world revolved around soccer. He played for the Dallas Texans and won national youth titles, traveled to tournaments, and developed a reputation that earned him attention from major college programs. Notre Dame recruited him, and from 2013 through 2016, he was a dependable starter for the Irish. He was never the loudest player, never the one chasing headlines, but he was steady, disciplined, intelligent in his positioning. He earned First Team All-ACC honors as a senior and graduated with a degree in computer science, one of the more demanding fields on campus. That combination of athletic toughness and academic rigor is what Notre Dame has always valued, and it is also what would carry him through the twists that lay ahead.
Toronto FC called his name in the first round of the 2017 MLS SuperDraft, twenty-first overall, and for a moment it felt like the kind of validation every kid dreams about, the dream that the years of youth tournaments and college seasons were building toward. He packed up for Canada and carried with him the hope that this would be the beginning of a long career, but professional soccer is an unforgiving place where rosters shuffle constantly and one season can decide everything. Most of his minutes came with the reserves, flashes here and there, enough to keep the door cracked, and then he tried again the following year with Bethlehem Steel in the USL. He saw the field, he fought for a place, but it never became permanent, and by the end of 2018, he was released. Just like that, the thing he had been chasing since childhood was gone. A lot of players would have let that be the end of it, the moment they hang it up and call it a career, but Aubrey had something else in his pocket — a degree from Notre Dame — and he leaned on it, stepping into the quiet rhythm of software engineering while the game he loved drifted into the rearview.
Still, the idea never really left him. He kept thinking about what his wife had said that night on the couch, and after a while, he decided there was no harm in trying. His days were devoted to engineering, but once work was done, he’d drive to empty fields, carrying a bag of balls, and chase daylight until the sun went down. He studied tape, slowed down videos, tried to learn the rhythm of a position he had never played: the snap, the hold, the strike, all of it timed to a fraction of a second. There was no crowd, no coaches, no scouts keeping an eye on him, just the sound of his foot meeting the ball, over and over, and the belief that maybe he could turn this crazy idea into something real.
That chance came in 2022, when the Birmingham Stallions of the newly reformed USFL gave him a shot. Aubrey took the job and immediately proved himself. He hit eighteen of twenty-two field goals as a rookie, then improved to fourteen of fifteen the next year while going perfect on thirty-five extra points. The Stallions won back-to-back championships, and suddenly the man who had once been a soccer player and an engineer was now one of the best kickers outside the NFL. In July 2023, the Cowboys called.
Trying out for Dallas is not the same as trying out anywhere else. The Cowboys carry a weight that goes far beyond football, and stepping into their camp means stepping onto a stage where every kick is magnified, every snap replayed, every mistake picked apart by thousands of eyes. This is the franchise that has called itself America’s Team for decades, and with that comes a spotlight that never dims. Kicker had become a sore subject for Dallas fans, the kind of position that inspired groans before games even started, and into that environment walked Brandon Aubrey, a twenty-eight-year-old with no NFL experience, and a background that sounded more like a curiosity than a résumé. He had to prove it with every swing of his leg, and by the time camp was done, he had.
What followed was one of the finest rookie seasons a kicker has ever had. Thirty-six of thirty-eight field goals converted, forty-nine of fifty-two extra points, one hundred fifty-seven points in total, a Pro Bowl selection, and the trust of a fan base that had long been skeptical. The novelty of his story gave way to respect for his consistency.
The second season confirmed it was no fluke. In 2024, Aubrey drilled a sixty-five-yard field goal, the longest in the league that year and a new Cowboys record. He was perfect on extra points and finished tied for second in scoring among kickers. He was not a sideshow anymore. He was elite.
Now in 2025, he is showing that he has staying power. The sixty-four-yarder against the Giants did more than tie a game; it sent a message that Brandon Aubrey is the kind of player who changes the geometry of the field. His presence alters how coaches call plays, how defenses line up, and how the crowd feels when he jogs out with the game in the balance. In a league where one bad month can end a career, Aubrey has proven nothing but consistency under the brightest of lights.
What makes his story resonate is not just the improbability, though that is striking enough. It is the way it embodies resilience and reinvention. Aubrey rebuilt himself at an age when most athletes are already defined. He took the discipline of his education, the steadiness he had honed as a defender, the technical eye of an engineer, and forged a second career in one of the most pressure-packed positions in sports. He did it without shortcuts, without pedigree, without anyone guaranteeing success. And he accomplished it through work and faith.
For Notre Dame supporters, that is what makes the story feel so close to home. Aubrey may not have played football under the Golden Dome, but he was an Irish athlete all the same. He wore the crest, he lived the balance of books and practice, and carried himself with the quiet resolve that has defined so many who came through South Bend. His resilience, his refusal to walk away, his willingness to try again when the world thought the story was over; those are values Notre Dame fans recognize.
So when he lined up for that sixty-four-yarder, it was more than just a kick. It was years of lonely practice sessions, nights spent chasing a dream with no guarantee it would lead anywhere, a wife’s belief spoken from the couch years earlier, and a man’s decision to see if he could change his life. It was proof that greatness does not have to follow a straight line, that ambition can take root again and flourish even when it seems too late.
What Aubrey represents now goes beyond the numbers beside his name or the distances attached to his kicks. He’s proof that belief doesn’t fade just because the calendar moves on, that ambition can survive long after most people would have shelved it. His journey spans from Plano to South Bend, from the practice fields of Major League Soccer to the championship nights of the USFL, through office hours and keyboards, and ultimately to the biggest stage in American football. Each stop looked like an ending until it wasn’t. What he’s shown, more than anything, is that you can start over, that you can build something new from the pieces of what came before, and that sometimes the courage to begin again is the truest mark of a competitor.
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