Kicker looking for new identity with Bengals

There is Jonathan Brown, and then there is Jon Brown.

There’s Jonathan Brown the soccer player, who once competed for the U.S. Soccer Under-17 national team and participated in its residency program, who then went to the University of Kentucky on a soccer scholarship; and then there’s Jon Brown, newly minted placekicker for the Cincinnati Bengals out of the University of Louisville.

They are one in the same – which makes for one of the most intriguing stories playing out on the fields across from Paul Brown Stadium.

“Sometimes it's OK to be on the road less traveled,” Bengals special teams coordinator Darrin Simmons said. “Sometimes all a guy needs is a chance.”

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A high school wide receiver in Clinton, Mississippi, soccer was Brown’s first love. He dreamed of the World Cup instead of the Super Bowl. But after leaving Kentucky and transferring to Louisville as a soccer player, former St. Louis Rams kicker Brett Baer – who also hails from Mississippi – got in Brown’s ear about kicking footballs.

Initially incredulous at the idea, Brown said he prayed about it and asked for a sign. He then happened to pull up a Texas A&M roster and saw that Josh Lambo also had a soccer background.

“I kept fighting it like, 'Nah, I'm not kicking a football,'” Brown admitted. “But I just felt like God kept getting at me and throwing signs at me. So I was like, 'All right.'”

So, he went all in.

After one semester of soccer, Brown left the program and would drive nearly nine hours round trip in a day to go work out with Baer in Louisiana.

Forgoing the financial aid of a soccer scholarship, Brown paid his own way on the Louisville football team. In 2014, he kicked off nine times – and averaged 62.8 yards per kickoff. He appeared in one game in 2015 before pulling an oblique, and never saw the field again.

“I was like, this has to work because I gave up soccer,” he said.

All of that work culminated with Louisville’s pro day March 9, where a Bengals scout noticed him. That led to the Bengals bringing him in for a tryout – the only NFL team to call him.

“We decided to bring him here on a trial basis and thought enough of his ability that it required a longer look,” Simmons said. “He has a big leg, yet he just doesn't have a whole lot of experience.

“We will work with him here for a couple weeks to see if we can develop him and go from there.”

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Brown said the longest kick he’s ever made in practice is 70 yards, and that it took him just under two hours in his first training session to get the hang of kicking a football over a soccer ball.

And it only took a day for Mike Nugent, who is entering his 12th year in the league this season, to come away impressed.

“We kicked together (Monday) – very good,” Nugent said. “He hit the ball very consistently today and you can just tell, by talking to him for a couple minutes, that he’s coachable,” Nugent said. “I’m really big on that. You can talk to a kid for five minutes and be like all right, this kid is not listening to me. He was very coachable.”

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Brown knows how odd this all sounds, and looks.

“I played on the USA team and all that,” Brown said “I was like top 40 for my class in the country out of high school. It was rough (to give up). But at the same time, no black people kick. I was like, 'I've never kicked before. The odds are against me.' I tried to fight it for the longest, but God's going to get you to do what he wants you to do. I'm just doing his will I guess. I ended up going with it, just kept the faith and it led me here.”

He doesn’t have a social media presence anymore, wiping away the digital life of soccer player Jonathan Brown (though that is the name his mother calls him). He is on the Bengals' roster as Jon Brown, and hopes that will be good enough to lead him to a new identity as an NFL player – even if he knows the Bengals currently have Nugent and Zach Hocker on the roster.

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“I do look at this stuff,” Brown said. “But at the same time, it's like the path I had to take to get here, I feel like I had to go through so much the last five or seven years of my life. They were the only team to contact me. It was weird, too, but I was listening to (televangelist) Joel Osteen. I was listening to one of his messages. The title was ‘A shift is coming.' I was listening to that, I just felt it deep down. He was saying 'You’re one phone call away from your destiny. Your time is coming.' Thirty minutes later, that's when the Bengals called me. I just felt like there's been little signs like that. I just felt like this is the place I'm meant to be.”