Last night, Brandon Aubrey kicked a 66-yard field goal. It happened in a preseason game, so it didn’t count in record books, but in an NFL-adjacent environment, Brandon Aubrey kicked a football after a snap and a hold and it went through a set of uprights 66 yards away. 66 yards is the longest distance over which someone has successfully done this in the NFL regular season.
Is Brandon Aubrey the best kicker in the NFL? Maybe. He had a pretty darn good year last year. He was third in the league in field goal percentage, attempting more field goals than either of the two kickers who led him in that category. Lest you worry he was a chip shot merchant, he also led the NFL in made field goals beyond 50 yards. His extra point results were puzzlingly mediocre, so that holds this back, but there is at least a chance that this 29-year-old man whose professional soccer career didn’t pan out went and turned himself into the very best player at one specific position in America’s biggest sport.
The story on Aubrey, for those who don’t know, is that after a four-year soccer career at Notre Dame, he entered the 2017 MLS SuperDraft, where he was selected by Toronto FC. He never appeared in an MLS game, spending two seasons in the USL, a league below MLS in the American professional soccer hierarchy. After his release following the 2018 season, he went pro in something other than sports, but in late 2019, he began working with a kicking coach three times a week. Given the differences between kicking soccer balls and kicking footballs, it’s only a little bit of a stretch to compare this to a young retired hockey player deciding to take golf lessons in his spare time.
In 2022, Aubrey joined the USFL, kicking for the Birmingham Stallions. On the heels of two good seasons there, the Cowboys signed him last summer, and now he’s here, kicking like Justin Tucker with none of the football pedigree.
There are a number of inefficiencies in sports. This was the point of Moneyball. One shape they take is artificially limited talent pools. In motorsports, the requirement that most drivers come from wealthy families likely keeps the world from discovering the true best talents. Baseball was long shackled by the color barrier.
I wonder whether the football industry is leaving vast stores of kicking talent untapped.
This isn’t meant as a slight towards Aubrey. I’m not saying “anyone can do this.” Aubrey is clearly an immensely talented man. I’m also not trying to anoint Aubrey as the best kicker in the NFL for the next five years. Kicking is a difficult mental game, one where failures often multiply once they begin. We haven’t seen Aubrey respond to a slump. We can only call him the best kicker momentarily.
Still, the fact that a good-not-great soccer player could become this good at making field goals raises a lot of questions about how NFL kickers are recruited and developed. This is the equivalent of that young retired hockey player turning his three golf lessons a week into a career like Scottie Scheffler’s.
Theoretically, college football should be a good proving ground for aspirant kickers. With nearly nine hundred college football teams in the country and nearly all of them rostering multiple kickers, there is ample opportunity for these guys to prove themselves. There are reasons to doubt, though, that this is happening.
First, there’s the matter of becoming a college kicker, or becoming a college athlete in general. A sample of roughly three thousand kickers might be sufficient for finding the best, but that will only be the case if that sample comprises the best three thousand high school kickers from the relevant four-year period, or roughly the best 750 per high school graduating class. This isn’t exactly how college sports work, especially at a position like kicker. More and more, programs know how good a kicker will be based on their recruiting profile, but the kicker position is not the running back or linebacker or quarterback position. Success in kicking correlates less with raw physical gifts and experience than is the case with those roles. It’s no wonder many college football programs, like their NFL counterparts, treat the kicker position as a check box, one where they try to find someone who can do the job adequately enough for their coaches to focus on other things.
Second, kicking is a small-sample profession. Even Aubrey, potentially the best kicker in football, attempted just 90 kicks last year in NFL games. That’s with a season much longer than those of a college player. It’s hard to find a reliable data set in a sample that small. It’s especially hard when factors like weather often go unnoticed, and when factors like the performance of the long snapper and holder go entirely unnoticed. Theoretically, if the best kicker in the world pops up at a D-3 school in Tulsa, that kicker should find his way to the top. If that kicker’s long snapper sucks on even five snaps, though, that kicker’s stats are doomed.
Third, given how mental kicking is, there’s reason to believe kickers might benefit from taking up the profession later in their life, like Aubrey, when their brain is more developed. The raw physical skill of kicking the ball is essential, and some familiarity with competitive environments is necessary, but did Aubrey benefit from attempting his first high-leverage kicks ten years later than many of his peers, when his brain had matured enough to handle the situation?
Then, there’s the matter of what happens the kicker reaches the NFL. NFL rosters are thin, and while there’s none of the “Hey, my neighbor’s kid was a decent high school kicker” that undoubtedly pervades the sample in the smaller half of the college ranks, a 32-team league often features only 50 or 60 rostered kickers in training camp. With kickers capable of kicking at older ages than running backs run, this takes that 750-kicker/year sample from earlier and whittles it to four or five kickers per class. The barriers to entry are gargantuan. The power of inertia is immense. Once a kicker is established, they often stay established for a very long time. Behind motorsports, the kicker position is maybe the least commoditized labor market in all of American pro sports.
How to fix this? That too contributes to the problem. While it would be valuable for most NFL teams to find a better kicker, the effort necessary is prohibitive. Teams can’t find every former soccer player in their metro area and sign them up for 150 annual kicking lessons over a four-year period. There’s an opportunity for collective action—the NFL as a whole could invest in this sort of project—but that eliminates the competitive advantage such a project would yield.
The likeliest thing to lead the kicker position to reach its full potential is, to bring this full circle, Brandon Aubrey. NFL teams aren’t going to finance those 600 kicking lessons, but interested individuals with the relevant physical skillset might. Aubrey has modeled a path from one’s couch to the center of America’s largest professional sport. It’s only accessible to those with certain physical gifts and resources, but those gifts and those resources are common enough to believe that there are probably more Brandon Aubreys out there. Because of him, they’re likelier to figure out they can try this themselves.
