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FOOTBALL Really great, really lengthy and detailed article on Kevin Byard

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Gets deep into his time at Middle Tennessee, from TheAthletic.com (subscription):

Titans’ Kevin Byard still feels combine FOMO as he continues path toward NFL stardom

a small excerpt:

...He makes the 45-minute drive back to campus relatively often, even working out and doing conditioning drills with the Raiders during the winter months.

“He’d always come back and run gassers with us,” said former MTSU corner Charvarius Ward, now a rookie with the Kansas City Chiefs. “He was always at the front of the line. He felt like no college player should beat him, ever. He was still leading by example.”

Byard sometimes still voluntarily jumps into the most grueling workouts that college players endure.

“What NFL guy does mat drills?” said Steve Ellis, MTSU’s secondary coach. “It’s crazy.”

Byard ducked his head into the locker room before the WKU game, and the current players went nuts.

“Kevin’s like the President to them,” Ellis said. “They just want to make him proud.”

But the All-Pro is still one of the boys. Ellis laughed that Byard still drives a Jeep.

“He’s a selfless kid,” Ellis said...
 
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not a part of the article but the author added this in the comments section beneath the article:

Fun fact I wasn’t able to get into the story: Steve Ellis played for Jon Robinson when Robinson was an assistant coach at Nicholls State. How about that?! Very rare for an NFL GM to have that experience. Given their history, Ellis was initially in Robinson’s ear about Byard as Byard was coming up.
 
I cant find myself caring about pro too much. How well known is Byard around the league?

Even though he was an All-Pro, I'm not so sure he was that well known. At least not in Dallas, by people that are paid to know. Deion didn't know who he was and Jason Witten didn't seem to know much about him as he riverdanced on the star. Maybe that's a bad example though, since those guys are exactly setting the standard in their current jobs.
 
Byard is known well enough to many. He's a very good player and after his incident the other week of dancing on the star, he's definitely on the radar of many in terms of name recognition. He's starting to become one of our more well known former players in the NFL, if not the best known.
 
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