Any Dallas Cowboys fan will tell you: a star has quietly, and then very loudly, emerged over the last few seasons.
A player who has sealed wins not with a last-second catch or goal-line stand, but with the swing of his leg and the calm of a warrior. But Brandon Aubrey never grew up dreaming of the NFL. He didn’t even grow up thinking about football.
His road to becoming one of the most accurate kickers in league history started on a very different kind of pitch, and with a very different dream.
Before they were a Cowboys fan favorite couple, Brandon and Jenn Aubrey were just two North Texas kids chasing Division I dreams.
Jenn was a high school All-American at Ursuline Academy of Dallas, a latecomer to lacrosse who rocketed up the ranks after picking up a stick as a freshman.
“Then freshman year I decided to start playing lacrosse,” she remembers. “And sophomore year I was recruited.”
Brandon, meanwhile, was the soccer kid in Plano who never took his jersey off.
“I think in fifth grade I wore a soccer jersey every single day to school,” he says. “It was always my dream to be a professional athlete. Soccer was what I chose to chase down.”
They met as seniors in high school, both already ticketed for the University of Notre Dame. On campus, they grew up together — on the field and off.
“We kind of figured out who we were as adults together,” Brandon says. “So you can’t really separate us at this point. I feel like half of you is just kind of missing.”
At Notre Dame, Brandon helped the Irish win a national championship in 2013 and became a star center back. Jenn thrived in lacrosse. Two big dreams, both realized.
After graduation, Brandon got exactly what his fifth-grade self dreamed about: a professional contract with Toronto FC in Major League Soccer, followed by a stint with Bethlehem Steel FC.
But the reality didn’t feel like the fantasy.
“I’d always treated it like a job,” he says. “When I got there, I’d watched these guys on TV for so long and didn’t really feel like I belonged. A little bit of imposter syndrome. I was afraid to make mistakes and I think that limited my ceiling. As soon as practice was done, I was done with it for the day.”
Jenn could see it from the outside.
“Yeah, I did think he played scared,” she says. “His demeanor wasn’t the same. At Notre Dame, he was a star there. He loved it, was having so much fun and excelling at everything. It just wasn’t like that anymore.”
The competition level skyrocketed. Brandon was no longer the star, just one of the guys fighting to hang on.
“You’re on the field and you’re just kind of one of the guys,” he says. “You’ve got to find a way to scratch and claw your way onto the team.”
Eventually, after his stint with Bethlehem Steel FC, Aubrey did the thing so many athletes dread: he walked away.
“I was ready to start a family, start a life,” he says. “I thought I was putting myself behind the eight ball if I wasn’t making as much money as I could as a software engineer. So it was time to move on.”
He took a job at GM Financial. Jenn became a pilot instructor at American Airlines. It looked like their lives were settling into a new, more traditional chapter.
Then came one random night on the couch. They were watching an NFL game, just like they’d done a hundred times before. Except this time, Jenn was watching the kickers.
“We were actually just watching the game and I was watching the kickers, examining them,” she says. “And I’m thinking, I think Brandon could do that. He was very good at soccer with super powerful shots. He took the PKs and set pieces. And he was unstoppable.”
So she said it out loud.
“I told him, ‘I really think you could do that,’” Jenn remembers.
Brandon’s first reaction?
“He’s like, ‘Jenn, do you know how much work it takes to be a professional athlete?’” she laughs.
Her answer: actually, yes, I do.
That was the spark.
The very next day, they bought a football and a tee and headed to Jenn’s local high school field. No coach. No routine. Just a former soccer player, a ball, and a big idea.
Brandon backed up for a 60-yard attempt.
He hit it.
“We started a couple yards closer,” Jenn says, “but he set up for a 60-yard goal, kicked it and made it — with no training whatsoever. We were like, okay. We have something here.”
“It felt pretty natural,” Brandon says. “I was just going to where I was comfortable away from the ball and running up to kick it. I knew that’s not the way NFL kickers do it, but it felt natural.”
The Aubreys started searching online and found performance kicking coach Brian Egan.
“Yeah, Performance Kicking Academy,” Jenn says.
Brandon showed up not to some elite private workout, but to Egan’s free weekly middle-school and high-school clinic.
“I saw on his website, ‘first one’s free,’” Brandon says. “So I showed up. At that point, I had no shame. I’d already flamed out of soccer, so I’m like, it doesn’t matter. If I look bad, I look bad. It doesn’t matter.”
Egan saw something special. Brandon kept coming back. Week after week. Year after year.
For three years he trained, learning everything from footwork to timing to how to handle pressure as a kicker, not a defender.
The next problem: film.
“One of the biggest obstacles was Brandon needed game film,” Jenn explains. “We’re out of school, and obviously we need film to get to the NFL. The USFL at the time just happened to have an inaugural season.”
Brandon signed with the Birmingham Stallions, using the spring league as his proving ground. It was his chance to show that the guy who could hit from 60 yards on a high school field could do it under the lights, with a rush coming at him.
The NFL noticed. In 2023, Brandon Aubrey signed with the Dallas Cowboys, the team he grew up watching with his family every Sunday. “Yeah, my family would sit down and watch the Cowboys every weekend as a kid growing up,” he says. “So it’s truly a blessing to be here. My family still lives 10 minutes from the practice facility.”
Not everyone believed in the move at first. “A lot of people didn’t believe it was the right decision,” he admits. “But the people that made the decision believed it in their hearts and gave me every opportunity to succeed. And I’m really thankful for that.”
He didn’t waste the opportunity.
Since joining Dallas, Aubrey has become one of the most accurate kickers in NFL history, with an 88.2% career field goal percentage and multiple All-Pro selections. He already holds the league record for most career field goals of 60 yards or longer, with six.
From “software engineer watching a game on the couch” to “record-shattering kicker for America’s Team” in just a few years, it’s one of the wildest pivots in modern sports. “It’s crazy, especially when it’s something that as a kid you didn’t set out to do,” he says. “So many people do set out specifically to have this job and work their entire lives to be as best as they possibly can. It’s just a testament to how hard we worked in a short amount of time and how we let the failures from one path translate into success on another with the lessons we learned.”
If there’s a theme to the Aubrey story, it’s belief, especially Jenn’s belief in Brandon.
“Yeah,” Jenn says. “Definitely from the very beginning.”
Now the couple is raising their young son Colton, with another baby boy on the way, while Brandon kicks under the biggest spotlight in football.
He hopes his sons will be old enough to remember this chapter.
“I want him to be able to realize just how cool it is and how special it is for someone to have a platform like this,” Brandon says. “It’s a blessing. It’s been incredible. It’s a dream come true. Hopefully we can do it long enough where he can really take that in.”
And as for where he wants that dream to continue?
Meredith puts it plainly: This is such a dream to be in Dallas and we hope you never leave.
“Me too,” Brandon says with a smile.
Is the goal to stay?
“Yes, absolutely,” he answers.
Jenn doesn’t hesitate either.
“That would be amazing,” she says.
For two kids from North Texas who once just dreamed of playing college sports, it’s hard to imagine a more unexpected, or more fitting, field of dreams than the one they now share at AT&T Stadium.