Every other week, Nevada Sports Net will spotlight a local athlete as part of our “Legendary Athletes” series, which is presented in partnership with Legends Bay Casino. Today’s featured athlete is Brock Marion, who played football for Nevada from 1989-92 before a 12-year NFL career that included two Super Bowl titles and three Pro Bowl berths. Marion is now the defensive backs coach for the UFL’s Michigan Panthers.

Brock Marion was a high school star at West High in Bakersfield, Calif., although he tried his best not to be at times.

Marion’s father, Jerry, played briefly in the NFL in 1967. And Brock figured that would be his destiny, too. It was so destined there were times Brock felt like he didn’t have to practice.

“I was, like, ‘I’m not doing this crap,'” Marion recalled. “It’s crazy because there were several times I tried not to play football when I was in high school. I was working at a restaurant. I was a busboy. I was getting ready to be a host. I was gonna be a prepper. And I was making my own money, and I wasn’t going into practice. My coaches called my dad and asked him, ‘Why’s Brock not in practice?’ He’s, like, ‘What do you mean?’ So, I had a conversation with him until he said, ‘Go to practice.’

“I’m, like, ‘OK.’ Then for the next week, I didn’t go. They called him again. He showed up at the restaurant, picked me up and took me back to practice. And he did that for a week to make sure I was at practice. I was making money as a young high school kid, and you’re thinking, ‘I’m making my own money! This is great.'”

Marion admits he made some poor decisions in high school, but it didn’t derail him from that ultimate goal of reaching the NFL. He got a boost to that level at Nevada where he starred from 1989-92 before spending a dozen years in the league where he won two Super Bowl titles, earned three Pro Bowl berths and remains one of the top players in Wolf Pack history with a résumé that’s almost unmatched. And he partially credits former Nevada assistant coach Mike Bradeson for that.

“I was a pretty high recruit coming out of California,” said Marion, who led the state with 13 interceptions as a prep senior also starring in basketball and track and field. “On signing day back then, I left. There were several colleges at my house. I left and went out the back door. My dad didn’t even know I was leaving. I was, like, ‘I’m not even going to college.’ And then Coach Mike Bradeson called me every day for a month. Never talked to me about football once. He asked me to come on a trip. I came. He asked me, ‘Did I want to come?’ I asked him if he offering me a scholarship? He said, ‘Yes.’ I’m, like, ‘Yep.’ That was it. That’s how I ended up in Nevada. It’s part of my history. Coach Bradeson is part of my history.”

The move was mutually beneficial. Marion was a four-year starter in Nevada’s defensive backfield and a stalwart on some of the best teams in program history. He started on the 1990 team that reached the FCS national title game, the 1991 team that started 12-0 and spent three months at No. 1 in the nation and the 1992 team that became the first to win a conference championship in its first season in the FBS.

A 2006 inductee into the Nevada Wolf Pack Hall of Fame, Marion finished his Wolf Pack career with 303 tackles, 13 interceptions and 57 passes defended. He was a three-time all-conference player who fondly remembers his time in silver and blue, which was the hey day of Nevada football.

“It was great,” Marion said. “I remember my freshman year we started four freshmen in the secondary and we got torched. We played against John Friesz from Idaho, and he was killing us. He went on to be an NFL quarterback. We were freshmen playing against this guy. We learned what not to do, and that made us better because you weren’t beatin’ us. It was a highlight of our college career, playing each week, the triple overtimes, playing for the Cannon. It was always blue when I was there Just leaving that legacy and trying to be a part of the Nevada Wolf Pack and build on that was really great.”

A seventh round NFL draft pick in 1993, Marion immediately join the reigning Super Bowl champion Dallas Cowboys. After two years as a key reserve and special teams player, Marion became a starter in 1995 and over the next 10 seasons started 153 out of a possible 160 regular-season games plus 10 more in the playoffs. He won two Super Bowl titles, recording an interception in the 1995 win over Pittsburgh while playing alongside all-time greats like Emmitt Smith, Deion Sanders, Troy Aikman and Michael Irvin, among others.

While seventh-round draft picks rarely last a dozen years in the league, Marion did, recording 912 tackles, 31 interceptions, seven forced fumbles and making the Pro Bowl in 2000, 2002 and 2003, a huge list of accomplishments for a player who didn’t even know how he’d make it out of training camp with the Cowboys.

“I got to camp and everybody was real,” Marion said. “They weren’t sugarcoating. I remember one of my first meetings, it was a lot of DBs. There was, like, 17 DBs in our room and they told us, ‘We’re only keeping nine.’ So, you start looking around the room, like, ‘What the heck?’ These guys were on the Super Bowl team from the year before I got there. They’ve been on the practice squad. And you’re thinking, ‘How the heck do I make this squad?’ What I really honed in on was just, ‘Don’t make any mistakes.’ But the coaches, players, everybody wasn’t really sugarcoating anything. You either made the play or you didn’t, and you just needed to make more plays.”

Upon retiring while on the top of his game after the 2004 season, Marion moved to Florida to run a blueberry farm. Admitting now he doesn’t know how that happened, football eventually called him back. Marion spent time as a personal trainer and high school coach and last year joined the staff of the UFL’s Michigan Panthers. This is his second season with the Panthers, who is led by former San Francisco 49ers head coach Mike Nolan. The Panthers will play Birmingham in a conference championship game Saturday with Marion, now 54, enjoying giving back to the game.

“The fulfillment is just being able to talk to them and show them how to play football,” Marion. “Some of them have played and been in NFL or been in a camp here or there and they’re here to try to get back. To see it from the eyes of a former secondary player who played at a high level, to be able to pick their brain and to show them, ‘This is how I see it’ and to be able to manipulate things with their eyes to their movements, that’s the most fulfilling part is them being able to see it and it click. I’m not playing the game, but I am playing the game.”

And he’s thankful for his time at Nevada and for the impact Bradeson had on him almost 40 years ago. When Bradeson passed away after a battle with pancreatic cancer in 2019, Marion attended his funeral in Reno to pay his respects.

“I was 18 years old when I left home and I had a guy who took a chance on an 18-year-old who he thought had some skill,” Marion said. “When I got there, he didn’t just turn me loose. He took me under his wing and said, ‘OK, I’m gonna help you out.’ … To get back and to meet his wife and meet his son, I got closure on that. When I met her, she said, ‘He talked about you all the time.’ It was good to see her and to meet here just so I could put a face with the name.”

You can watch the full interview with Brock Marion below.