Officially speaking, Cowboys kicker Brandon Aubrey connected on 4-of-4 field goal attempts in Cleveland- every single one from 40 yards or more- during the team’s 33-17 opening-day win over the Browns.
Everyone knows he actually hit an NFL-record-tying fifth, too… except it didn’t count.
But the kick the whole world will be talking about for a while is the one he didn’t get to even try.
Special teams coordinator John Fassel went through all of it with reporters during a Monday press conference, admitting with a laugh that “the blood has boiled down a little bit” after a confusing series of events that saw Aubrey, the second-year phenom and former soccer star, drilling a 66-yard field goal… and then, for a brief but thrilling moment, prepping to try it again from an impossible-sounding 71 yards.
Aubrey had already hit from 57 and 40, but his third attempt of the day came from 66 yards out, which would have tied the current NFL mark and matched a boot Aubrey made just last month during the Cowboys’ preseason game in Las Vegas. Dallas was already up 20-3 in the waning seconds of Sunday’s first half, but it took just the right sequence of events to put the offense in position for the attempt.
“Coach asked me where we’ve got to get to to get in field goal range,” Fassel explained, “and I said, ‘Just across the 50.'”
So when Jalen Tolbert was forced out of bounds at the Cleveland 48 with nine seconds remaining, the field goal unit hustled onto the field.
But that’s when things went wonky.
“What it looked like, to me, was two issues happened,” according to Fassel. “It looked like they got the quarterback ball off the field late, and they got the K-ball in late. Then once they got the K-ball set, one of the officials- when he saw a defensive substitution- stood over Trent [Sieg, Cowboys long snapper] and said, ‘Hold, hold.’ So Trent wasn’t able to address the ball to get ready to snap it. … So by the time we got over the ball and snapped it, we were one second late.”
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Aubrey’s ball sailed through the uprights, but the flag negated the kick. Loud complaints about the clock from Fassel and head coach Mike McCarthy fell on deaf ears (although the Cowboys could also have used one of their two remaining timeouts, even if they shouldn’t have needed to), and the line of scrimmage was moved back five yards.
That first kick looked like it would have been good from 71. And for a tantalizing moment, it appeared as though the Cowboys were going to try it. McCarthy had already taken off his headset, he said, apparently content to turn Aubrey loose.
“We actually considered it,” Fassel confessed. “If it was going the other way, we might have kicked it because there’s a little bit of wind at our back going the other way.”
A quick check-in with Cowboys punter and holder Bryan Anger told Fassel it was going to be very close. Anger confirmed the 66-yarder was hit “about as clean as [Aubrey] can hit it” but then added, “I’m not sure it made it by more than five [yards].”
The Browns already had a return man waiting under the goalpost in case the try came up short. And that got Fassel flashing back to a late September afternoon in 2008.
Fassel was a first-year assistant special teams coach for the Raiders that season and saw head coach Lane Kiffin send out noted long-range specialist Sebastian Janikowski for an absurd 76-yard attempt at the end of the second quarter of a game against the Chargers.
“I’ll never forget. Antonio Cromartie’s back there, and I’m like, ‘Oh, damn,'” Fassel remembered. “He catches the ball on the goal line, and we’re covering a kickoff with 10 offensive linemen against Antonio Cromartie.”
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Luckily, the return didn’t even reach the 30, but the Chargers were closer to a big return than Janikowski’s cannon shot had been to being successful.
“That was, I think, the day before Lane Kiffin got fired,” Fassel noted.
A similar play had once burned McCarthy even worse. As the 49ers’ offensive coordinator in 2005, McCarthy watched Bears return ace Nathan Vasher return a field goal attempt 108 yards for an end-of-half score.
Fassel told reporters the risk of letting Cleveland back into the game with a dramatic touchdown going into intermission- and with the Browns set to receive the second-half kick- was simply too great.
“Immediately, both of our memory banks went, ‘Ah, let’s go ahead and take the kicker off the field and put the ball back in the quarterback’s hands.”
Aubrey was pulled, not even aware that he had been thisclose to being given a shot at the NFL record.
“In the moment, I didn’t know it was from 71,” Aubrey said from his locker after the game. “I thought it was still 66, because I thought they called a timeout, not delay of game. So it’s hard to say how I would have reacted out there, but it’s probably the right call on the day in the conditions.”
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Winds in Cleveland on Sunday were near 15 miles per hour, with the stiffest breezes blowing into the northeast end of Huntington Bank Field, the side open to Lake Erie. That had definitely factored into Aubrey’s approaches on the day.
“On the one end zone, the end zone where I got the 57 and the 66, there was kind of a big wind that picked up around the 20-yard-line going right to left and a little bit into the field. So it was tough,” he said. “In the warmup, the ball was moving a lot more than it normally does.”
While the 29-year-old said he would “absolutely” like to try from 70 or beyond in a game someday, he conceded that Sunday was neither the time nor the place.
Not that anyone was going to consult with him anyway.
“To be frank, I don’t have any input into the decision,” Aubrey explained. “Bones and Anger are probably talking about it, and McCarthy’s involved. I’m sitting over by the net, just waiting for the call. I go out there and kick what they tell me to kick.”
Kind of like the 66-yard bomb he made less than a month ago in the enclosed Allegiant Stadium.
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Fassel said taking the go/no-go call out of the kicker’s hands is the way it should be, ostensibly since a professional kicker will likely always say he can sink any kick asked of him. Not trying the 71-yarder on Sunday was, both coaches believe, the right call.
“We did the wise thing,” per Fassel.
But a full 24 hours after the fact, the coordinator was definitely still thinking about what might have been… and almost was.
“Gosh, that would have been fantastic. I mean, that would have been an all-timer,” Fassel mused. “Especially in Cleveland, because grass, and the conditions. I mean, what a kick. Geez.”
And it begs a very obvious question: how far would he let Aubrey try from in an enclosed stadium, on turf and with no wind? At a place like, say, the Cowboys’ home venue?
“In AT&T Stadium?” he asked.
Fassel says he already has a max distance in mind.
“I don’t know that I want to give you the number, so other teams don’t use it against us,” he revealed. “But it would be a pretty significant distance that I’m not used to. It’s like, ‘Gosh, I don’t know what the ultimate range is.'”
It feels almost inevitable to think that Cowboys Nation is going to find out at some point this season.
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