Every now and again, you’ll find an Easter egg in the practice participation reports NFL teams release each week leading up to game day. Yesterday’s concerned an unexpected absence from Cowboys kicker from Brandon Aubrey, who had jury duty in Tarrant County. It was a quaint little story—stars, they’re just like us!—that, at least for me, recalled an era in which athletes worked ordinary jobs in the offseason to make ends meet, a decidedly normal reminder that the gladiators we watch each week pay taxes and go to the DMV like the rest of us. The news cycle figured to move on 20 minutes after this became a talking point, at which point it would be business as usual ahead of the Cowboys’ next scheduled loss to the 49ers on Sunday.
Except it didn’t. Because, as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Nick Harris was the first to report, Aubrey was selected for the jury. The best part, per Harris: Aubrey stopped the Cowboys from throwing their weight around to get him out of it because he “insisted on fulfilling his duty.” (That sound you hear is Tim Rogers’ insufferable bluster about a fellow Notre Dame grad caring about the greater good, because something, something, Touchdown Jesus.)
The case is felony assault, and the defendant faces a charge of second-degree strangulation. The jury will not be sequestered, and the judge has apparently indicated a willingness to “work with Aubrey with his football schedule.” Still, there’s more we don’t know here. How long will the case go? Will Aubrey in the NFL take the field consumed by the weight the criminal justice system has heaved onto his shoulders?
These are questions I can’t answer. But I am, with every fiber of my being, certain of this: Brandon Aubrey needs to be the jury foreman. Sorry, not sorry, to the other 11 fine citizens of Tarrant County fulfilling their civic duty alongside him.
Because Jose in accounting can’t block out distractions like a man with a near-automatic conversion rate from 50 yards out.
Tom the plumber won’t be equipped to navigate dysfunction in the deliberation process like a man who works someplace where his direct supervisor could get publicly embarrassed by the CEO, millions of people across the globe talk about it, and everyone goes back to work pretending things are super normal.
Can you, Mary in HR, claim with a straight face that you wouldn’t explode at the juror who proves day after day that he’s definitely not qualified to be there, because so much of your job is cleaning up the mess the worst run game in football leaves you? No, you cannot, which is why you must bend the knee to your new thunder-booted foreman.
Jokes aside, felony assault is nasty business. And as someone whose most recent brush with jury duty is watching the Amazon show of the same name (highly recommended, by the way), I’d be lying if I thought playing for Cowboys or doing most anything else adequately prepares someone to hear and see awful details, then marshal a group of strangers to decide whether another human being should be removed from society.
That said, there are worse training grounds than spending each minute of your working life in a national fishbowl and continually proving yourself as the single most competent person in that environment.
So I say put Brandon Aubrey in that foreman seat. Get out of his way. And watch justice get served.
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