Keith Bulluck has been with the Tennessee Titans his entire career, being drafted out of Syracuse in the first round of the 2000 NFL Draft. One of his teammates that first season, and for the next six seasons, was Steve McNair. McNair clearly left an impression on him, because Bulluck just gave nine scholarships in McNair’s name.
For those who don’t know, McNair died in July of 2009 after being shot multiple times. During the 2009 season, Titans players wore the number “9″ sticker on their helmets, to honor McNair, who wore that number on his jersey — and that was the reason Bulluck chose to give nine scholarships.
According to the Tennessean, Bulluck’s gesture was a surprise to the high school football players in Middle Tennessee who each received the Steve McNair Iron Will Scholarship, $1,000 toward college scholarship money. And the linebacker didn’t just hand off the responsibility of selecting the winners from the 54 candidates, either. As Bulluck told the Tennessean regarding the applications, “I read through all of them, looked at their GPAs, looked at their extracurricular activities, looked at their coaches’ comments, saw how much they were involved in things and how many years they lettered on teams.” One of the winners, Juwan Turner, who plans to be a walk-on at Univ. of Tennessee Martin, called Bulluck a “role model.”
And as Yahoo’s Shutdown Corner blog noted, it’s a particularly nice gesture from Bulluck. That’s because this past season may have been his last with Tennessee, since he’s an unrestricted free agent who’s recovering from ACL surgery performed on his left knee. Much like Scott Fujita, who we covered at Tonic, just because you may be leaving a team, that doesn’t mean you can’t make a lasting impression on the city you’ve played in, something Keith Bulluck has made evidently clear.
Photo by Keith Allison via Flickr.