Have cleats, will travel.
After eight seasons with San Francisco, New Orleans, Indianapolis, and Tampa Bay; six games into his ninth year, veteran kicker Doug Brien was waived by Minnesota. And with a Super Bowl XXIX ring and 155 career field goals, he was holding out hope that there'd be a No. 156.
By signing Brien in March 2003, the Jets offered him a chance that there would be.
"At that stage in your career, you're just not sure if that's it or not," Brien said. "I mean, I definitely felt like I was still capable of kicking at a high level. But you never know if you're going to get a shot.
"I was very fortunate that I played against the Jets and Mike Westhoff, who was the special teams coach, a lot. I had known him, so I knew what he was all about. That he was intense and had super high expectations. I welcomed it. I had my expectations, too. I liked to be pushed.
"He was one of the better, if not best special teams coaches in the league. He reached out and we chatted, and it ended up working out. It was definitely a welcomed opportunity."
Brien had the opportunity to kick a game-winner in Week 10 of his first season with New York, and he came through. With the Jets and the Raiders tied at 27 in overtime at Oakland's Network Associates Coliseum, he booted a 38-yard field goal.
"I'm from the Bay Area, so it was definitely a special game. I had like 30 people, friends and family, attending," Brien said. "I remember my daughter, who must have been like 4- or 5-years-old, she wanted to wear a Brien Jets jersey. And I looked at my wife like she was crazy. I said, 'That's a horrible idea. It's at the Raiders' stadium, people will throw beer bottles at her.' And she's like, 'She's a 5-year-old girl. They're not going to do that.' And I said, 'Yeah, they will.'
"And so, anyway, she didn't wear it. But I do remember them telling me after the game that after I had made that field goal in overtime, security had to come over and escort them out because Raiders fans were giving them a hard time for cheering so much.
"And (head coach) Herm (Edwards), instead of traveling back with the team, he let me stay and miss practice on Monday to spend some time with my family. So that was a pretty special one."
It was a little safer, but the same situation the following season when the Jets met the Chargers in San Diego for the AFC Wild Card game. After four quarters, they went to overtime tied at 17, and Brien was the hotspot again. And again, he came through. This time with a 28-yard game-winning field goal to break the franchise's five-game road playoff losing streak.
"I remember having to do it twice because they called a timeout," Brien said. "I kicked it, I made it, and then it was like, 'Oh, it didn't count. Timeout.' And so that's always a little unnerving. But it was a short kick, and I made it again. Obviously, it always feels good to make those kicks. Especially in the playoffs."
Going on to play for Chicago, Brien would retire from the game in 2005. What makes him most proud of his decade-plus-two-years career?
"I didn't even start kicking until I was a senior in (De La Salle) high school (in Concord, CA), and I was a college walk-on (at Cal). I mean, I learned very late. And just the fact that I played for 12 years, I never would have expected in a million years to average over 80 percent, win a Super Bowl, and just have this amazing experience where I learned so much," Brien said.
"So few people get that experience. It's one I'll never forget. I've gone into business and started companies since I retired and really feel like my training as an NFL kicker makes you ready for anything. In fact, it almost just makes anything else seem easy.
"I've been a CEO of a public company, and people will ask me, 'Oh, this must be so hard. How do you deal with this and that?' And it's like, 'This job is easy. My old job, you got one chance, and it was binary. You were either the hero or the goat. You either made it or you missed. And it all happened in one moment, and it was over.'
"In business, you have second chances. You can bring in your team to figure things out. It's just, to me, everything is almost easy compared to making it as an NFL kicker."
In his goalpost-free second career, Brien co-founded Waypoint Homes in 2009. "We bought single-family rentals during the foreclosure crisis, and ended up buying 17,000 homes over about eight years and took the company public," he said.
And in 2016, Brien co-founded Mynd, a tech-enabled real estate company. With an all-in-one digital platform, investors could find, buy, finance, insure, lease, manage, and sell single-family rentals remotely.
In May, Mynd merged with Roofstock.
"We help investors, both institutional and retail investors, have an end-to-end partner to help them invest in single-family rentals," Brien said. "We do everything from help them buy, finance, we do all the management, and we do it in a very sophisticated way. We built our own software, collect lots of data, make that data transparent, and just create a better partner to invest more successfully in real estate."
From Seattle to Miami, San Diego to Washington, Chicago to Corpus Christi, Roofstock does business in 63 cities across the country.
"We manage about 20,000 properties right now. We'll probably have 40 or 50,000 in the next year," Brien said. "So that's, call it $6 to $9 billion of AUM [Assets Under Management]. But we've done with Roofstock, another $7 billion in transactions. Buying and selling of assets."
Making their home in Piedmont, CA, Brien and his wife, Shanti, have three children: Lilli, Ceci, and Zach.
