- The Kaysville defensive end gives Weber State football a second public athlete lane: Davis County roots, All-Big Sky production, and a defensive story that keeps Ogden visible.
- Jackson Gilkey, Brayden Wilson, Weber State Football connect back to Weber State University and the wider football picture.
- The story is backed by 2 sources and a visible last-verified date.
May 19, 2026
May 19, 2026
4 min / 962 words
2 official links
Brayden Wilson led the Big Sky in tackles for loss as a Weber State Football defensive end in 2023, racking up 16.5 TFL — a total that also ranked 11th nationally across all FCS football. He added 7.5 sacks in the same season, earned second-team All-Big Sky honors, and started 11 games. The Kaysville, Utah, product has spent his college years giving the Wildcats a Davis County route into the program's defensive front.
The 25-game career line entering 2024 — 81 total tackles, 23.5 tackles for loss, 8.5 career sacks — places Wilson among the program's most-productive defensive linemen of the past several seasons.
Kaysville to Ogden
Wilson is from Kaysville, Utah, the Davis County city that sits between Salt Lake County and Weber County. His prep football came at Farmington High School, the relatively new Davis School District program that opened in 2018 and quickly built up its football pipeline.
The drive from Farmington High to the Weber State campus measures roughly 20 minutes north on I-15. That makes Wilson one of the program's clearer in-state developmental routes — Davis County prep football to Ogden's FCS program.
Davis County's football corridor includes Davis High, Northridge, Layton, Syracuse, and Farmington. The county has produced consistent college football signings over the past two decades, and Weber State has been one of the regular beneficiaries of that pipeline. Wilson's emergence as a Big-Sky-leading TFL producer adds the most recent name to the corridor's college lineage.
The 2023 season
Wilson's breakthrough season was 2023. The Big Sky's tackle-for-loss leader from that year, his 16.5 TFL placed him atop the conference's defensive disruption stat and ranked him 11th nationally across FCS. The 7.5 sacks tied him for the conference's top defensive-end sack-production tier.
The second-team All-Big Sky selection followed. Big Sky All-Conference selections are voted by the league's head coaches, which means the rest of the conference's defensive coordinators identified Wilson as one of the league's best defensive ends after a full season of game-planning against him.
The 11 starts in 2023 represent a full conference workload. FCS programs typically play 11-game regular seasons, which means Wilson started every available game during the breakout campaign.
The career production line
Weber State credits Wilson with 25 career games entering the 2024 season, 81 career tackles, 23.5 career tackles for loss, and 8.5 career sacks. The TFL total places him among the program's most-productive recent defensive ends, and the consistency across two seasons proves the 2023 breakthrough was not a single-year outlier.
A defensive end producing tackle-for-loss totals at that rate carries particular value in modern college football, where the position has become more specialized around pass-rushing rather than run-stopping. Wilson's production line shows up across both phases — TFL totals include both run stops and pass-rush negative plays.
For the Big Sky specifically, defensive-end production matters because the conference's offenses lean heavily on quarterback-run and play-action concepts. A defensive end who can disrupt those plays before they develop forces the offense into more predictable looks for the rest of the defense.
The Weber State coaching context
Wilson's career at Weber State overlapped with head coach Mickey Mental's tenure. The Wildcats announced on November 10, 2025 that they were parting ways with Mental after a three-year run that finished at 13-20 overall and 8-14 in the Big Sky. The coaching change adds an offseason variable to Wilson's program future.
Interim head coach Brent Myers took over for the closing games of 2025, and the program's permanent head-coach search will determine the defensive scheme going into 2026. Wilson's TFL production is the kind of resume that should fit any incoming staff's defensive concepts — the position requires the same individual skills regardless of the scheme around it.
The roster's defensive front was one of the program's stronger position groups during the 2025 season, with Wilson and the rest of the defensive line giving the Wildcats a reliable defensive identity even through the season's quarterback injury and head-coaching change.
The Davis County football pipeline
Davis County produces FCS football signings at a higher rate than any other Utah county that does not house an FBS program. Weber State has been one of the regular beneficiaries, but BYU, Utah State, Utah Tech, and SUU have all signed Davis County products over recent cycles.
Farmington High specifically opened in 2018 and has built up its football program quickly. Wilson is among the school's earliest All-Big Sky honorees, which helps cement the program's reputation inside the Davis School District network.
The local recruiting reach also matters for Weber State. Wilson's name on the All-Big Sky team is the kind of recognition that helps the Wildcats' staff close the next round of Davis County prep signings.
What's next
Wilson's senior season at Weber State runs through the program's 2026 offseason transition. The next concrete data points will be the head-coach hire (typically announced in December for FCS programs), the spring depth chart, and the program's transfer-portal movement.
For Wilson, the next individual measurement window is the 2026 season's TFL production — assuming he remains at the program through the coaching change. The career line he carries into the offseason gives him one of the Big Sky's strongest defensive-end resumes heading into his last college season.
After the college calendar closes, the NFL Draft window and the Canadian Football League's evaluation process become the next professional measurement opportunities. A defensive end with 23.5 career TFL and 8.5 career sacks at the FCS level typically receives priority-free-agent or undrafted-camp-invite consideration at the NFL level.
For now, the verified record is the 2023 Big Sky tackle-for-loss leader, the second-team All-Big Sky selection, the 25-game career line, and the Kaysville-to-Ogden recruiting route. That gives Weber State football a documented defensive front to build into the next era around.
