The science of Brandon Aubrey

Why don't more ex-soccer stars switch to football?

The best story in football this season is not the quarterback down in Washington.

Nor is it the resurgence of Sam Darnold in Minnesota or the breakout of Saquon Barkley in Philadelphia.

All are good stories.

But sorry, the best, most fascinating story is without a doubt the Dallas Cowboys’ kicker.

In just his second year in the league, Brandon Aubrey has already been dubbed the “Stephen Curry of kicking” — by Tom Brady, no less. He appears to have no limit to his range. He lined up for one kick earlier this year at 71 yards, which would have broken the NFL record by 15 feet. He ended up nailing a kick from 66 yards, tying the league record, but it was waved off due to a clock violation.

It won’t be the last time, because it wasn’t the first: Aubrey hit a 66 yard kick during the preseason. He’s also hit from 65 yards this year. He had yet to miss a kick of 50-plus yards in his career (16 for 16) until sailing a 51 yarder against the Giants wide right. It was just the third miss ever for Aubrey, who had started his career 35 for 35, smashing a rookie kicking record last year.

What makes Aubrey so remarkable at kicking?

The answer may not surprise you, although I’m here to tell you why it should: He spent most of his life as a soccer player.

The Steph Curry of kicking

Growing up in Plano, Tex., Aubrey won 5 state titles as a youth soccer star from 2005-10 and was ranked as the 43rd best player in the country coming out of Plano High School in 2013. He earned a soccer scholarship to Notre Dame, became an all-American defender, and was drafted in the first round of the MLS Draft.

After two seasons, Aubrey got cut by an affiliate of the Philadelphia Union, and it seemed like his sporting days were done. He took a job as a software engineer for GM Financial (you can still find his LinkedIn profile). Reportedly, he was watching NFL RedZone one day when he saw kickers missing and got the idea to see what he might do kicking a football.

He’d had some experience playing football before. He’d just always played wide receiver.

A rare transfer

Making the switch from pro soccer to pro football sounds like a natural adjustment. But it’s actually quite rare.

Yeah, there was Jan Stenurak and Pete Gogolak and Tony Fritsch, but the list really isn’t that long. Why?

Well, some ex-futbolers have complained that the NFL football is harder and tougher than the football they’re used to, with much greater pressure, causing more stress and injury. Others have lamented the lifestyle change. Being a kicker is a quirky role, requiring an obsessive attention to detail and excellent time-management skills. It’s not for everybody.

A few, like Tony Meola, have noted a much more important reason why converting from soccer to football kicking isn’t seamless. Meola, a star goalkeeper for Team USA during the 1994 World Cup, was brought in to try out for the Jets in training camp. Meola was a NJ native and a multi-sport athlete, but he played basketball and baseball in addition to soccer. With the Jets, the award-winning soccer goalie got cut after the third preseason game.

From an article in The Guardian:

He remembers the coaches drawing a little circle on the ball, where they wanted kickers to aim. “(And it’s) the size of a 50c piece,” Meola says. “A soccer ball has a big circumference. You can hit one side or the other side and it still goes 60 yards. That’s not the case with a football.”

So the actual skill of kicking a football is a lot different than what’s required in soccer.

Let’s talk for a moment about what it actually means to transfer one particular skill to another domain.

Skill transference

The two main concerns about skill transfer are magnitude and direction. Magnitude: Is the transfer effect strong or weak? And direction: Has it been achieved in a positive direction (better performance) or negative? You can generally apply these questions to any application of skill transfer, whether it’s riding a bike, learning the piano, or kicking a round object.

The sensible theory that transference is easiest when two situations are alike has been around since Thorndike at the turn of the last century. You would think that sports that are alike would automatically produce stronger positive transfer from one to the other, like kicking in soccer and football. But this is a dangerous assumption. Many times, it’s the activities that seem more familiar to you that are the hardest to switch into, because the differences in how the skills are executed are more subtle.

These small differences in two similar actions can easily slip into negative transfer. Negative transfer is bad. It means that your performance at the new task would be worse than if you had just started as a total novice off the street, because you’re so indebted to the skills of the initial task. It’s embarrassing.

A good example is baseball and cricket. Has anyone successfully jumped from one to the other (I’m asking; I don’t know!) A few years ago, a star professional cricketer named Kieran Powell tried to cut it in Major League Baseball but he never advanced beyond a tryout with a couple clubs. There are a lot of similarities between batting in baseball and cricket that would seem to promote strong positive transfer, but also some big dissimilarities: cricket bats are wider, cricket pitches are bounced, the baseball mound is closer, etc, etc. Negative, negative, negative. Powell may not have been worse than a novice, but he didn’t get too far.

This has been looked at in many, many different ways over the years, and the problem is generally chalked up to the skill specificity required to become an expert in certain tasks. When elite rugby players were asked to anticipate a rugby players’s next movements on a video clip, for instance, they performed far better than a novice. They were then asked to identify the type of pitch being thrown by a baseball player — a totally different skill than they have trained. At this, these elite athletes were worse (or no better) than a novice off the street.

Given this, it’s not surprising that a lifetime of soccer training would make it hard to magically jump over to football. So what makes Aubrey’s story different?

I think what gets lost in the retelling of Aubrey’s story is that he worked for two years with a private kicking coach in parks and fields until he had his routine down, which is why he didn’t become an NFL rookie until age 28. His kicking coach seemed to know what Aubrey might encounter, and so he warned him that success making the transfer was unlikely. I will make the assumption here that, in those sessions, Aubrey and his coach identified the areas likeliest to produce strong positive transfer between his soccer-kicking ability and eliminated the possible pitfalls into negative. These areas may be physical (how to reposition your body to strike a non-moving football) or perceptual (what to focus on while approaching the kick).

What they didn’t assume is that because he’s good at checkers he’d automatically be good at chess.

Links

Mobile apps can serve as an effective alternative to traditional imagery skill techniques for young athletes … New study documented the training volume and intensity of six elite Chinese rowers during a 44-week period leading up to the 2019 World Championships … Could ADHD actually be a superpower for some athletes? … Does this cooling headband actually boost performance? … Elite Athletics and the Social Nervous System … Scientists discovered the secret to one man’s 1,100 pound deadlift … Having a hobby is good for your body and brain … The science behind sports’ most popular supplements

References

Müller, Sean, et al. "Does expert perceptual anticipation transfer to a dissimilar domain?." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 41.3 (2015): 631.

Oppici, Luca, and Derek Panchuk. "Specific and general transfer of perceptual-motor skills and learning between sports: A systematic review." Psychology of Sport and Exercise 59 (2022): 102118.