Dallas City News

A friend of mine named Ari Temkin once brought up an interesting point about Dan Bailey. He noted that Bailey and his high level of consistency and success may have been one of the worst things to ever happen to Jason Garrett.

The point was that because Bailey was so reliable that Garrett became, uh, reliant upon him to the point that he was too conservative in moments and opted to kick a field goal where going for it on fourth down may have been the better decision. That is an argument for a different day (if you want to have it), but whether Bailey’s reliability was a detriment to anybody, it was something that Dallas really missed when it was gone.

Dallas shockingly released Dan Bailey in the final roster cuts before the 2018 season so it has been a minute now; however, despite flirtations with different replacements who had their own types of success, it wasn’t until recently that everything properly crystalized.

The Cowboys will begin training camp in approximately two weeks and for the first time in a while nobody needs to chart kicks or talk about the wind in Oxnard.

Kicker is not a question entering training camp for the first time in a long time

It has been six years since the Cowboys decided to move on from Dan Bailey. In that time there have mostly been two different kickers that preceded Brandon Aubrey.

Brett Maher was the first one to get a shot at things and was wildly impressive (especially considering the context of the situation) throughout that first year. He had a cannon for a leg and had range almost as long as Steph Curry’s, but everything faded across his second season with the team in 2019.

When Mike McCarthy took over he hired John Fassel to run the special teams group, and even though Bones has been one of the best decisions that the head coach has made, he has not been without his flaws. The biggest one was easily holding on too long to Greg Zuerlein with whom he had a shared past.

Like Maher before him, Zuerlein was given two years and ultimately proved to not be the answer. To be clear this wasn’t before Fassel backed him with all of his might, going as far to say literally “if I’m wrong then I’ll be wrong, but I really think I’m going to be right” as he likened Zuerlein’s struggles to Tiger Woods. Seriously. This happened.

This took us to training camp in 2022 when everybody Dallas had with them, notably then rookie Jonathan Garibay, was a disaster. Coming off of the mess that was Zuerlein with nobody able to win the job in Oxnard, the Cowboys turned back to Maher of all people and the jokes wrote themselves. This author specifically had a lot to say about it.

Amazingly Maher turned in an incredible season for the Cowboys and it seemed like we were on the verge of the most incredible story; however, Maher had an all-time meltdown in the team’s playoff win in the Wild Card Round over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and lost the trust of everyone. It was heartbreaking and unfortunate given the journey he had been on to that point, but moving on was the only thing that made sense.

This took us to last year and if it isn’t obvious almost 600 words in there were serious questions about this position and the team’s approach to it as they arrived in California during the summer of 2023. To make matters more frustrating/questionable, the most serious contender for the job was a former MLS kicker in Brandon Aubrey who we obviously knew nothing about.

Aubrey won the job and missed his first ever professional kick, an extra point in the early part of the season opener against the New York Giants; however, this became, and will ultimately be remembered, as incredibly ironic given that he went on an absolute tear with 35 consecutive field goals made, the most ever to start a career.

It feels like forever ago, but Brandon Aubrey was a First-Team All-Pro last season. How could he not have been? This is not Brett Maher in 2019 or Greg Zuerlein at any point, this is (in terms of how we perceive it) peak Dan Bailey from a stability standpoint.

At the moment the only wonder that anybody has about the Cowboys kicker is whether or not they will actually be used on the new kickoff given the extreme state of unknown surrounding the rule change, but that is a situation and question independent of who Aubrey is as a point-scoring machine. These are the good and proper times. We made it.