Cowboys Kicker Brandon Aubrey Breaking the Stagnation in the NFL
Practice, Training, and Conjugate: The Brandon Aubrey Case Study
“I feel like when I kick a ball I expect it go in..”
Dallas Cowboys kicker Brandon Aubrey is changing expectations in the NFL. Week 2 of the 2025 season, he drilled a 64-yard field goal to force overtime, then a 46-yard game-winner as time expired—the first time in league history that’s ever been done. Aubrey was named NFC Special Teams Player of the Week for his performance, the most in Cowboys franchise history.
Here’s the kicker with this story: Aubrey never played peewee, high school, or college football. He was a soccer player. When he finally gave football a try—on his wife’s suggestion—he wasn’t even playing soccer anymore. He was retired and working as a software engineer.
Fast forward to now, and this former soccer player is redefining high performance for the NFL kicker. The neural network of absolute strength puts us in a position to understand how such a transformation can occur.
Practice vs Training
Practice is applying the neurology and biology you already have to execute skill. Your neural network of absolute strength organizes its biology to produce output. Kicking a ball through goalposts is practice.
Training is work at a stimulating enough intensity that propagates specific change. It stimulates your neural network of absolute strength to scale up, and its biology adapts to handle more load.
Here’s where programming gets counterintuitive—nuanced:
Sometimes practice work can rise to the level of training, if the repetitions are intense enough to stress the propagation of adaptation.
In other words, practice and training can occur in conjugation.
Training or Practice? Both—in Conjugation.
Constraint Shift: Weight & Shape
A regulation soccer ball weighs 410–450g (14–16 oz).
An NFL football weighs 397–425g (14–15 oz).
So the soccer ball is usually slightly heavier. Aubrey’s nervous system spent years striking a heavier round ball. At certain times, that striking was both practice and training, simultaneously—in conjugation.
In those instances of both—in conjugation, that work lead to training effects where his neural network of absolute strength specifically scaled up the motor units and refined the sequence to output maximal force against that load.
When he transitioned to football, the load dropped slightly, but the shape constraint shifted. The oblong ball is less forgiving: strike it a few degrees off and accuracy vanishes.
Why Aubrey’s Transition Makes Sense
Absolute strength neural network was primed by soccer (handling a slightly heavier ball).
Football demanded a retuning of precision, not a reinvention of force output.
The nervous system and it’s neural network of absolute strength doesn’t care about the uniform; it cares about tasks under constraints. Soccer trained the network under one constraint (heavier, round, moving). Football expressed the same network under another (slightly lighter, oblong, static, precise).
Programming Takeaway
