John Urschel’s career as a football player coming out of Penn State was nothing that would normally make headline news. He was a promising guard on the offensive line, drafted in the sixth round by the Baltimore Ravens in 2014, and started around 13 games in his first few years in the league.
And yet, in Baltimore and beyond, he became an extremely notable figure for one reason: in 2016, he enrolled in a mathematics PhD program at MIT while playing football full-time and facing off against 300-pound defensive tackles every week.
Urschel retired from the NFL in 2017 to focus on his academic pursuits, also citing worries about head injuries and CTE. Although he’s been out of the spotlight for nearly a decade, he hasn’t been idle.
Former NFL lineman makes breakthrough discovery on 30-year-old math conundrum
For around one year after he enrolled at MIT, Urschel somehow juggled the demands of two extremely rigorous careers.
Being an NFL player requires daily practices, meetings, and workouts—not to mention travel, game times, and media responsibilities. And, crucially, the MIT PhD program is not exactly “night school.” PhD students at MIT are expected to study full-time and devote themselves to what is widely regarded as one of the top programs in the world.
Urschel even had to hide the fact that he was enrolled from his team during the 2016 season. He reportedly crammed an entire doctoral course load into the window between Sunday games and Tuesday morning practice, which is staggeringly impressive.
After retirement, he could fully devote himself to his studies and true passions. Recent news suggests it has paid off with a major development.
His discovery, recently published in the paper “On the Growth Factor of Random Matrices,” deals with Gaussian elimination. It’s a fast, systematic way computers work through equations with millions of variables, and it drives the algorithms behind our search results, weather, engineering, financial models, and more.
For about 30 years, though, mathematicians have suspected that Gaussian elimination could spiral out of control and produce wrong results at increasingly large scales. A fellow mathematician, Nick Trefethen, had posited years ago that the math would hold—but no one could prove it.
Urschel just did.
Urschel is now an MIT professor and a major figure in mathematics
Urschel isn’t the first promising pro athlete to give up the money and fame for a higher calling.
Myron Rolle was an All-American football safety at Florida State and was drafted by the Tennessee Titans in 2010. He bounced around the league for about two years before retiring to enroll in medical school. Rolle is now a pediatric neurosurgeon.
Similar to Urschel, Laurent Duvernay-Tardif was an offensive guard with the Kansas City Chiefs when he also graduated from medical school. He opted out of the 2020 NFL season to work on the front lines during the COVID-19 pandemic, though he later returned briefly to professional play.
Though less of an academic pursuit, Pat Tillman famously turned down a multi-million-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. He chose to enroll in the United States Army Special Operations and was killed in action.
What’s fascinating about Urschel’s story is that he traded one rare and difficult achievement for another. Making it to the NFL has impossibly long odds, but becoming a faculty member in the MIT math department is an incredible feat in and of itself. And only a few dozen working mathematicians worldwide solve and publish conjectures at the level Urschel just did.
That puts him in exceedingly rare company.
Urschel is clear: he will always love football
With rising awareness of long-term brain injuries, concussions, and CTE coming out of high-level football, it’s hard not to wonder what might have been if Urschel had decided to delay his PhD dreams.
However, he’s adamant that he doesn’t want to be associated with an anti-football narrative. Yes, he was worried about the potential for brain injuries, but ultimately his decision came down to passion:
He loved football, but he loved math more.
“The main thing was that I thought about what I was most passionate about and what I was most excited about in life going forward,” he told the Baltimore Ravens. “When I thought about those one or two or three things, when football all-of-a-sudden was not one of these top two or three things, and football is actually actively hindering me from doing some of these things, well then it became a real conversation.”
Urschel is an inspiration and a standout example of working hard to follow your dreams. At 35, his NFL journey would likely be over. But his work in mathematics is just picking up steam.
