Kaleb Driggers and Junior Nogueira came into the 377 Last Hoorah with nothing left to prove in the world standings.

They won the aggregate anyway, en route to another regular season earnings record, this time moving the bar to $247,887.48 each.

The world leaders took the aggregate for $8,666.40 a man on Wednesday. They also picked up $742.50 for splitting third and fourth in the short round and $125.60 for an eighth-through-10th split in Round 3. Their $9,534.50 apiece closes the regular season at $247,887.48 for Driggers and $247,887.45 for Nogueira, No. 1 in both the heading and heeling, according to TRJ’s unofficial math. They went into the short round as the high team, 16.9 on three, 0.3 of a second ahead of Erich Rogers and Cory Petska.

Driggers said there’s only one chance to win the first standalone team roping, and he wanted it.

“It wasn’t necessarily a must-win, but I wanted to win it,” Driggers said. “There’ll never be another first-time standalone event in team roping. So I don’t know. It was just kind of something that I wanted to win for personal reasons or whatever. We already had the year-end No. 1, but nobody’s safe going into Vegas, and I just wanted to put good runs together and try not to run over myself and just do the best job that I could.”

The plan started with getting one caught.

“Honestly, going into it, I just wanted to rope my steers, try to get a good start,” Driggers said. “To begin with, it was fresh and wasn’t starting good, and ours kind of went on and tried a little bit. So I just tried to make sure and complete the course and get the first one down. And then moving into the second, third and fourth ones, we had an idea of what the steer was going to do, and we drew really good. And I just wanted to try and make sure and get a good start so I didn’t make it too tough on my roping, but tried to rope pretty aggressive.”

Nogueira said he went in with the same plan. He has been changing a couple of little things in his roping, and he laughed off a question about what they were.

“It’s kind of a secret,” he said. “I just want to rope my steers and not make mistakes, the same thing he did. I don’t want to be just trying to catch, because everybody’s so good. And I know the steers are a little stronger.”

Nogueira spent Wednesday morning at Luke Brown’s, where Brown is breaking in a set of bigger steers.

“So I got up early this morning and ran some with him, just to get a few in,” Nogueira said. “We were slowing down on some young horses. Andrew Ward was there too, and I ran probably like 12 head and came home and got ready. I just want to have the same feeling and make sure I get a good delivery.”

The win came close to home for both men.

“Like Kaleb said, we’ll be No. 1 going in, but this is pretty much our hometown,” Nogueira said. “We come over here all the time, all our friends and family, and we want to give it everything we’ve got. We want to have a great year, a great finals, because we’re getting older and slowing down a little, but we still love roping. We still love to do it, and we want to do as good as we can and try our best to finish it up.”

Watching the bubble

Driggers spent the day watching the NFR bubble race play out around him.

“I probably shouldn’t, but I was invested the whole time watching everybody rope, and it’s kind of an emotional roller coaster because everybody tries so hard all year and there’s a lot of dreams,” Driggers said. “It’s hard to watch guys that come short of their dreams for the season, but I know they’ll build on it and come back stronger for next year. I just think that it’s just a little bit tough to watch, especially having a giving heart or whatever, just knowing that we’re not really roping for that, we’re roping for something completely different. I don’t guess I’ve ever been anywhere per se where there’s so many bubble guys that are depending on winning today.

“So I guess you would sit there and watch, and somebody would catch and you’d be happy, and then somebody would mess up and you’d be sad, and it just seems like it was just kind of up and down all day. And just whenever it was our turn, I just really needed to go back even keel, focus on myself and just make sure and focus on the steer, and my horse pretty much does the rest.”

Nogueira watched too, and he said it’s hard to see friends come up short.

“Like he said, it’s kind of sad to see our buddies,” Nogueira said. “We fight all year. It’s a lot of driving, a lot of effort, practicing and horses. It’s the whole dream to make the NFR for everybody.”

He said he took a lesson from a story Jake Barnes once told a younger roper.

“He said, ‘What about the guy who gets up in the morning and prays, does everything right, goes to church, takes care of everything, draws his steers and ropes them, and this other guy doesn’t care, he just shows up. Who’s going to win?'” Nogueira said. “Everybody says for sure it’s going to be the guy taking care of everything. Yeah, he has the odds on him, way higher, but whoever ropes the best that day is going to win it. So it’s just team roping. Whoever ropes the best, it’s their day.

“At the end of the day, we’re all friends. We’re family, and almost everybody here provides for their family through roping. It’s a blessing to do what we love, and the NFR is a bonus. So it’s sad and happy at the same time. It’s sad to see some friends not make it, and happy to see some friends make it.”

The horses

Driggers rode 11-year-old Chics Like Hickey, the horse he calls his safety net.

“Oh yeah, I love riding Oliver,” Driggers said. “I wish he was better to rodeo on. He’s my safety horse. Whenever confidence is feeling low, I can always count on him. He isn’t always perfect; he’ll move around in the box or whatever the situation is, but it seems like I just pull, and then when I feel like I’ve pulled long enough, I let him go and he gets a good start. And then he’s easy to rope on, and on big, strong steers like this, he’ll take a hold of them good but not try and wreck them.

“It’s kind of a weird situation, because horses that are normally strong pull the steer too hard, whereas he’ll pull them strong and open them up, but not too much,” Nogueira explained about his partner’s horse. “So he just has a good combination. He is the best horse ever.”

Nogueira’s jackpot horse he rode at the Last Hoorah, Sons Of Stoli, may or may not get the NFR call.

“We don’t know yet. We’re working on it,” Nogueira said. “He’s really fast, so I like to jackpot on him. He did really good last year, when he was a little greener, and this year he did great too. We had a little fight this summer, because I tried to use him as my No. 1 horse all the time, but he’s an awesome horse.”

Tyler Tryan and Nicky Northcott, No. 2 in the world, were the Last Hoorah’s top earners at $10,916.10 a man. Cody Snow and Lane Mitchell were second in the aggregate.

Aggregate results (four head)

The finish caps another dominant regular season for the 2021 and 2022 world champions, who set the regular-season earnings record of $227,878 in 2022. Their 2026 totals would break that mark by about $20,000, according to TRJ’s unofficial math. It’s Driggers’ seventh regular-season title. He also won the regular season in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2022 and 2023, plus 2025, when he and Nogueira won the Governor’s Cup in Sioux Falls for $32,000 a man to go into the NFR No. 1 with $198,497.72. Nogueira had won the regular season seven times entering this year.

Vegas hasn’t always matched their regular seasons. Driggers won his first gold buckle in 2021 after finishing second in the world in 2016, 2017 and 2018 and third in 2019. In 2025, they came back from a practice-pen accident May 12 that fractured Nogueira’s right tibia to enter the NFR as the No. 1 team. There, they placed in four rounds and split the Round 10 win at 3.9 seconds. Nogueira earned $169,387 at the Finals and finished second in the world with $367,885, the same total as Driggers. Driggers’ season still went down in history: his PRCA earnings made him the all-time leading money earner in PRCA team roping, with $3,526,219 since joining the association in 2008, and he won $1.152 million in prize money and awards across all events. Nogueira, the 2016 all-around world champion, joined the PRCA in 2014 and hasn’t missed the Finals since. 2026 will be his 13th.