NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Brenard Wilson once remarked that he thought he was a better on the basketball court than the football field growing up in Daytona Beach, Florida.
He must have been one heck of a basketball player.
Part of a pioneering generation of Commodores who led the university forward, Wilson arrived at Vanderbilt just five years after Taylor Stokes became the football program’s first Black scholarship student-athlete. Taking the baton from peers like Stokes and Doug Nettles, the first Black student-athlete from Vanderbilt to play in the NFL, Wilson excelled in ways that set a new standard for Commodores who followed on the gridiron.
After twice earning second-team All-SEC honors for the Commodores, he went on to play nine seasons in the National Football League. A starter for the Philadelphia Eagles against the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl XV, he and teammate Dennis Harrison became just the third and fourth Commodores to play in the biggest game in American professional sports.
Wilson’s ascent bordered on meteoric. He not only went from an undrafted free agent to starting in the Super Bowl in less than four years, but he did so after missing out on an NFL roster on his first try.
Spotted by the Eagles when they scouted Harrison, Wilson couldn’t overcome an injury in his first NFL preseason in 1978. But after returning to Nashville to work in a local bank, he made the cut with the Eagles in 1979 and started all 14 games in his rookie season—including a game-clinching interception and 50-yard return in his NFL debut. In all, he played 126 NFL games, including 62 starts, and intercepted 17 passes.
Persistence was nothing new. Recruited out of high school by as keen a talent evaluator as Bill Parcells, then an assistant at Vanderbilt, Wilson initially redshirted Vanderbilt’s 1974 Peach Bowl season. Wilson told VUCommodores.com he even thought about transferring to follow his passion for basketball. Convinced by his mom to see it through, and following his dad’s passing that fall, he remained at Vanderbilt and carved out a legacy all his own.
Second in both single-season and career fumbles recovered, he earned All-SEC honors in each of his final two seasons. As the team’s only honoree in 1976, he ensured the continuation of a streak in which at least one Commodore earned first- or second-team honors every season between 1964-2002.
Vanderbilt’s football program was undeniably fortunate that one of its all-time greats decided to remain a Commodore. But the connections he forged proved of even more lasting importance to the university and Nashville communities. After his NFL career, Wilson and his late wife Genora made their lives in Nashville. Two daughters attended Vanderbilt, Kanetha Wilson earing her master’s and PhD in sociology and Dr. Raeshell Sweeting graduating magna cum laude in economics in 2002 and now serving as Associate Professor of Surgery and Vice Chair for Community Engagement, Section of Surgical Sciences, for Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
