When Andrew Mikkelsen was growing up in Oregon, BYU felt less like a college and more like part of the family.
His parents attended BYU. All eight of his older siblings attended BYU. Saturdays revolved around Cougar football, and as one of 10 kids growing up on a farm, Mikkelsen always imagined he would end up in Provo.
“Growing up, I always wanted to play football for BYU super bad,” Mikkelsen said.
At the time, that dream looked a lot different than the path he eventually took.
Mikkelsen played football, baseball and wrestled growing up. Football was one of his main sports, but kicking was never something he had seriously considered.
“I used to make fun of the kickers,” Mikkelsen said. “I made fun of kickers and thought they were lame. So I never would have guessed that that would be me.”
Then, when Mikkelsen was 14, a car accident changed everything.
After suffering a serious head injury, doctors told him it would be safer to stay away from contact sports for the next year or two. Football season had just ended, and suddenly the sport he loved felt like something he might have to give up for the rest of high school.
“They basically said, we want you to be done with football for the rest of your high school career,” Mikkelsen said. “Just because the chance of head trauma is pretty high.”
For a while, Mikkelsen sat in the stands and watched the same friends he had grown up playing with take the field without him.
“That was gutting to just be in the stands, cheering them on, but not being out there,” Mikkelsen said.
But walking away completely never felt like an option.
“My junior year, I just itched to play football so bad,” Mikkelsen said. “My only option was kicking.”
There was one problem. He had never kicked before.
“I didn't grow up playing soccer or anything like that,” Mikkelsen said. “So I had no natural kicking background, and I actually really sucked.”
What followed was years of trial and error.
“There was multiple times where I thought about throwing in the towel,” he said. “But it was my only option. If there was any plan B, I would have taken that right away.”
So Mikkelsen kept going.
“It was really impressive how he pivoted to something like kicking,” said Adam Mikkelsen, Andrew's older brother. “Just really impressive how he said, 'Well, I love this game and I want to do it. So what's another position that I can do?'”
Slowly, Mikkelsen started to improve. By the end of his junior season, a junior college coach pulled him out of class after seeing him kick in the playoffs.
“I was like, holy cow,” Mikkelsen said. “It was validation that a college coach went out of his way to express interest in me.”
By his senior year, Mikkelsen had become one of the better kickers in Oregon.
BYU, however, already had that position filled.
Mikkelsen reached out to the school himself, but with no luck. Oregon State was more aggressive, and because it was close to home, Mikkelsen went where he felt wanted.
“Where I was wanted versus where I wanted to be were two different places,” Mikkelsen said.
He signed with Oregon State and planned to play there before serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But even while he was in Corvallis, BYU remained an option.
“Where I wanted to be was always in the back of my mind,” Mikkelsen said.
After his mission, Mikkelsen decided to take another shot at the school he had dreamed about since childhood.
Getting there turned out to be far more difficult than he expected.
BYU initially rejected his application. The coaches told him they could not guarantee admission unless he was on scholarship, and he would have to get into school before he could join the team.
When Mikkelsen received the rejection email, he did not wait around.
“I got my keys, got my wallet, and I jumped in my car and drove to Provo,” Mikkelsen said. “Like a 13-hour drive overnight.”
He showed up at the admissions office unannounced and pleaded his case.
Eventually, a dean offered him a deal.
If Mikkelsen took a full course load, made up the credits BYU had not accepted from Oregon State and earned a 4.0 GPA, the dean would request a special exception and have his application reevaluated.
Mikkelsen accepted.
“I was like, well, shoot, I mean, there's a shot there,” he said.
Once he got to Provo, he also began working out with the football team. But even that was not guaranteed.
“They said, ‘Hey, we're actually not guaranteeing your spot on the team,’” Mikkelsen said. “You're going to have to compete with these six other dudes, and we're only going to take two kickers to fall camp.”
Suddenly, Mikkelsen needed straight A's and a roster spot.
“It was the most fun summer of my life, but it was also some pressure,” he said.
That summer, he got both.
Mikkelsen earned a 4.0 GPA and won the kicking competition. The same day the coaches told him they wanted to bring him into fall camp, he received an email saying BYU had accepted him.
“It all happened like in an hour,” Mikkelsen said. “Cloud nine, like one of the happiest days of my life.”
For Mikkelsen, that moment represented more than just getting into school or making a football team. It was the culmination of years of trying to find another way forward when the original plan had fallen apart.
“The dream was to be a football player for BYU, and that ended up happening,” Mikkelsen said. “I'm incredibly lucky because there's probably thousands and thousands of kids in middle school or high school right now that have the exact same dream. Reality is like less than 1% of them are ever actually going to live that dream.”
But the way it happened still surprised him.
“The funny thing was, it was just completely not the route that I thought it would be,” Mikkelsen said. “I played safety and running back. And objectively, just to be honest, I don't know that I was a good enough safety or running back to be able to go and play at BYU.”
The accident that had once seemed like the end of his football future had become the reason he found a way to BYU.
Mikkelsen eventually spent four seasons at BYU, handling kickoffs and living out the dream that once felt out of reach.
His first time seeing the field came against the University of Texas, in Austin.
“They said, hey, you're going to be our guy and you're going to do kickoffs,” Mikkelsen said. “We won the toss, so I had to open up the game for us.
“That was my first time stepping on an actual field to play for BYU,” he added. “It was kind of a crazy stage. That was like birthed by fire, as much as it could be for the kicker.”
Former BYU teammate Jonny Linehan remembers Mikkelsen as someone who never carried the challenges of his past around with him.
“He's super humble,” Linehan said. “I didn't even learn about his car accident till after he was finished playing. It's not something he's ever carried around. It's never been an excuse.”
After football ended, Mikkelsen found himself facing a different kind of challenge.
For most of his life, competition had given structure to his days. There was always another workout, another practice and another goal to chase.
Suddenly, that part of his life was gone.
“You move on from sports at a college level, and you start to lose your purpose,” Linehan said. “There's always a goal that you're working towards. And then once you're finished, it's like a snap of the fingers and it's like, well, what's my goal? What's my purpose?”
“A lot of people do struggle with the next phase of life and you miss a purpose,” Linehan said. “So it was kind of fun watching Andrew get that purpose through fighting and he's done really well with it.”
Long before Mikkelsen ever stepped into an MMA gym, fighting had always been around him. He grew up wrestling, and competition was a constant part of life in a household with five boys.
Even then, because of his head injury, Mikkelsen did not feel like MMA was something he could pursue seriously.
“It was like 14 or 15 years after that car accident before I ever stepped foot in an MMA gym,” Mikkelsen said.
After graduating from BYU and finishing football, Mikkelsen was working in sales and looking for something to fill the competitive space football had left behind.
“I didn't have as much of a competitive outlet anymore,” Mikkelsen said. “I was playing pickleball and pickup basketball and flag football, but it was like, I don't really have anything that scratches the competitive edge.”
When his brother moved to Utah and started training again, he invited Andrew to join him.
Mikkelsen thought he might be going to a beginner class. Instead, his brother took him to a pro sparring session and told the coaches Mikkelsen had wrestling and boxing experience.
“I was like, 'None of that's true, dude,'” Mikkelsen said.
But after getting thrown into the deep end, Mikkelsen realized he might actually belong.
“I feel like I'm actually kind of hanging with these guys,” Mikkelsen said. “I don't feel like I'm totally out of place here.”
Soon after, Mikkelsen started thinking about taking a fight. His wife, Ashleah, who could tell how excited he was, was supportive but hesitant.
“She was like, look, I know you love it. I don't think this is something I really want to get behind long term,” Mikkelsen said. “But if this is like a bucket list item and it's a one and done thing, then begrudgingly I'll give you the green light.”
Mikkelsen took the fight.
“I knocked the dude out,” Mikkelsen said. “And I was hooked. It was like the craziest dopamine rush ever.”
What started as one fight turned into 10. Mikkelsen fought eight times as an amateur, won amateur titles and eventually turned professional. He has fought twice professionally and won both bouts.
For Linehan, Mikkelsen's fighting success made sense because of the way he had always pushed himself.
“He's always been able to push himself to different limits and new heights,” Linehan said.
“I think a lot of people will stop when they get tired or stop when they get hit in the face specifically,” Linehan said. “But I think to him it's just motivating, keep him going, see how far he can push himself.”
Still, with a career in software sales and a growing family, MMA is no longer about chasing the UFC as fast as possible.
“Right now it's more of a passion and less of me pursuing the UFC,” Mikkelsen said. “But I'm still training. I'm going tomorrow. I'm still regularly in it doing it.”
For Mikkelsen, the path from BYU football to MMA was not as random as it might look. Both required him to chase something that did not come easily. Both forced him to keep going when the easier option would have been to stop.
And both, in different ways, gave him purpose.
When Adam looks at Andrew's athletic journey as a whole, the MMA success is not what stands out most.
“The MMA, definitely transitioning to being a kicker and taking that so far and working as hard as he did,” Adam said. “That was not his preferred position. I think he never would have imagined pursuing that option.”
For Adam, the most impressive part was the way Mikkelsen made the best of a path he never expected to take.
“It was the best option that he had if he wanted to keep playing that game,” Adam said. “And so he took that option and he just decided to get as good as he possibly could.”
When Andrew Mikkelsen thinks about the lessons he would tell his younger self, he thinks back to being 14 and feeling like the world had collapsed.
“Sometimes the Lord might put what look like roadblocks or hurdles in your path,” he said. “Depending on how you navigate those, sometimes it's a challenge that if you overcome, new doors are going to open up for you.”
His journey never followed the path he expected.
The dream was always BYU football.
The road there included a car accident, learning how to kick, being rejected, driving through the night to Provo, earning a 4.0, winning a kicking competition and eventually running onto the field in a BYU jersey.
Then came another unexpected chapter in the MMA cage.
“A lot of people dream about how cool it would be to go do X, fill in the blank,” Mikkelsen said. “If it's something that you're interested in and devoted to and want to chase, then either you talk about it or you go and actually live it and do it.”
Looking back, Mikkelsen sees the setbacks differently now.
What once felt like the end of the dream became the thing that sent him toward it.
“What seemed like a major life setback,” Mikkelsen said, “ended up being just a really, really windy roundabout path to actually ending up somewhere where I probably wouldn't have ended up had life gone according to plan.”