UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – In a matter of months, John Urschel went from playing in raucous NFL stadiums in front of thousands of fans to starting his day by hanging out with his 3-month-old daughter before making a 10-minute walk to his office at MIT.
Once there, Urschel tunes out whatever is going on around him and does what he’s always wanted to do.
“I sit and I think,” Urschel, a doctoral candidate in applied mathematics at MIT, told me. “No distractions. I just think. Maybe I write some stuff down or I’ll go on the blackboard. I just think. … Then I go home, eat dinner and maybe I’ll sit on the couch and I’ll think some more. … I spend just about all of my time every day just thinking — and I love it. I absolutely love it! I’ve never been happier in my life.”
There’s of course plenty of reading and meetings with his PhD advisor mixed in as Urschel, the 2013 winner of the William V. Campbell Trophy, known as the academic Heisman, tries to solve complex problems that have long captivated him. There are also the occasional speaking engagements like this one where Urschel was back on Penn State’s campus Thursday and Friday delivering a keynote address at a sports analytics conference and later serving as part of a panel surrounding concussion research.
This is the life Urschel spent so much time thinking about, even more and more so around this time last year as he went through the rigors of an NFL offseason while attending MIT, all in hopes to continue following two of his passions.
“As a mathematician you’re trying to fundamentally understand what’s going on with something and it’s through sort of logic and through step by step and that only comes by deep thought,” he said. “There’s no sort of cheap shortcuts.”
But there was a solution.
Urschel retired from football last August at 26 years old after three seasons in the NFL with the Baltimore Ravens. His decision came just days after he reported to training camp. It just so happened to fall two days after a study was released that warned about the dangers of football and brain injuries.
However, Urschel said his decision wasn’t linked to the early retirements of former NFL players who left the sport because of concussions and fear of CTE. Sure, he said he thought about the potential impact long before the study was released, but ultimately he was either going to retire or play one more season before opting to fully commit himself to a career in mathematics.
Once he reported to training camp, it set in that this tension that weighed on his mind since he left MIT to start football season could come to an end if only he’d let it.
“My No. 1 passion in life is mathematics and I’ve sort of known that in my heart that eventually my No. 1 thing is math,” he said.
That decision between math and football had long been the question that Urschel was forced to answer, especially from talent evaluators as the collegiate scholar-athlete pursued a career in the NFL. In a sport where the NFL has become widely known for standing for Not For Long, Urschel’s time at MIT reaffirmed that this was where he was happiest. Fighting for a roster spot was much less appealing when he could devote his time to his PhD.
“I was thinking about [NFL retirement] long before that [study] came out, and long before that came out I was deciding between it being my last season or me not playing and I really just tried to take all the time I had available to me to make the decision,” said Urschel. “It’s definitely something you need to look at, but it’s also something I believe as football players we are very aware of if you think about it. Like they were saying in there [in the panel] it’s not 99 percent [of people who play ending up with CTE], obviously. But it’s not zero percent and I don’t think it’s very close to either number, you know what I mean?”
Urschel was part of a Penn State panel on concussion research on Friday with the University of Michigan’s director of the NeuroTrauma Research Laboratory. He said afterward he had two documented concussions during his playing career, but the man who makes a living pursuing answers doesn’t have concerns about the future of his mind.
In fact, the timing for Urschel to leave football to continue his pursuit of higher-level mathematics made sense to him on so many other levels. There were academic requirements that needed to be met so he could continue his PhD and the more wrapped up he got in what started as an offseason of courses, the more he needed to decide. The timeshare of passions that he balanced for much of his life could also conclude while he still had his health.
“No back problems, no shoulder problems, no knee problems,” Urschel said. “Obviously, I’ve had some injuries and I have some wear and tear that everyone has, but for the most part I’m nearly clean as a whistle and not everyone gets to say that, so this is ideal. I’m lucky.”
Urschel’s life has taken a 90-degree turn, as he’d put it, with all of his attention now focusing on this one career path. There’s still chess, reading and family time, but being able to end his day in a similar way to how he starts by grappling with this one math problem in particular – known as the Asymmetrical Traveling Salesman Problem – has him as excited as ever to continue toward his next career goal.
“I will think every day, which is my favorite pastime,” he said, as a smile spread wide. “I’m going to try to solve some really hard problems that will help sort of like push knowledge forward and help the world in some way.”
