Tennessee Titans star Kevin Byard wins NFLPA MVP

Titans’ Kevin Byard is great.

The Tennessee Titans’ best draft pick in the last decade is up for debate, but you would be hard-pressed to argue that Kevin Byard shouldn’t be right there at the top of the list.

It is easy to gloss over the great things that athletes do in the community they live in, and I don’t know why. Maybe it is because they are only on our televisions for a few hours a week and then they disappear from public view for 6 months.

However, there is so much that goes on when fans aren’t watching and they spend exponentially more time in practices, coaches meetings, training sessions, and most importantly in the community doing things to make where they live or where they grew up, better.

Kevin Byard is such an impressive player that not only does he lead the league in interceptions over the last three years, but he basically lapped the pack and he could sit out a season and still probably have the record.

Beyond that, fans probably know that Byard had an open policy for a while last year where you could send in jerseys and he would sign them and send them back for free. That is incredibly generous when you think about how much money players usually make from signing events.

The good news/bad news there is that the Titans fans loved this so much, that he got overwhelmed and eventually had to stop because he couldn’t keep up with the demand.

However, the NFLPA just announced that on top of all of these things, Byard was named the NFLPA’s Community MVP for the opening week of the season:

Byard is a guy who played his college ball at MTSU, was snubbed by the NFL Combine, fell to the third round, was overshadowed by a draft class that included Jack Conklin and Derrick Henry, but despite all of that he has been one of the best players and people that this franchise has ever drafted.

There is a reason why he is called the Mayor of Murfreesboro, and there is a reason why you should go and grab a shirt that supports yet another charity that he advocates for. The reason for both is that he is a relentless worker who makes everyone around him better both on and off the field, and guys like that deserve local and national praise like this.

Congratulations NFLPA on getting it right.