Brandon Aubrey’s 66-yard field goal would have apparently been good from 72
We have now gone consecutive Saturdays with some of sports’ finest long range athletes converting in the name of America’s Teams.
On August 10th it was Steph Curry who caught fire in the name of the United States as they secured gold in the Olympic Games. One week later, it was Brandon Aubrey who boomed a 66-yard field goal for the Dallas Cowboys. Obviously these are equally great achievements!
It is possible that you missed the field goal as it happened. Let’s set the stage for you.
The Cowboys took over at their own 10-yard line after having scored their first preseason touchdown on the possession prior. With under a minute to go the odds of scoring were not high and most people were debating if they had seen enough to go to bed.
But kudos to Trey Lance who orchestrated the necessary kind of drive which was punctuated by a 20-yard run where he wisely got down in time for the team to call a timeout. It felt silly in a way to trot Brandon Aubrey out there, but the Cowboys let him try from 65 yards out last week so the pattern was set. They took their time, he got set and Aubrey unofficially tied the longest field goal in NFL history.
There are some amazing field goals where you have no idea how it happened and others where you knew the entire way. This was the latter.
From the moment we got the proper view of it you could tell that this was money in the bank. Like a lot of field goals we were all thinking that surely this would have been better from even further. It had the distance.
Shout out to the mothership’s Nick Harris who shared that it would have in fact been good from the downer part of down town. Apparently it would have been good from 72!
Aubrey was a perfect 10/10 from beyond 50 yards out throughout his stellar rookie season so seeing him succeed from long range is not exactly shocking. But this is not normal long range.
That Aubrey is a reliable weapon in this way is such an underrated element of the entire Dallas Cowboys operation. It would be foolish to assume that he can knock 66-yard attempts through with this level of ease on the regular (would it really, though?!), but consider that the line of scrimmage here was the Raiders’ 48-yard line. You are not supposed to be able to score from basically midfield!
Touchdowns are always preferable to field goals so this is not advocating for Steph Curry 3s all of the time. But if all the Cowboys have to do (relatively speaking) is get to midfield for a legitimate chance to put points on the board then they are in serious business.