The following is a snippet from my HTML form which pulls the options from the table rows accordingly.
What I want to do is have the first option value to be NULL so
No, POST/GET values are never null. The best they can be is an empty string, which you can convert to null/'NULL'.
null
'NULL'
if ($_POST['value'] === '') { $_POST['value'] = null; // or 'NULL' for SQL }