Baltimore Ravens John Urschel's starting his math PhD -- at MIT.

[pnwmom]

As he was recovering from a concussion in August, he worked on math problems . . .

http://espn.go.com/blog/baltimore-ravens/post/_/id/25428/what-offseason-ravens-john-urschel-is-starting-his-phd-at-mit

There's obviously no "off" in the offseason for Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman John Urschel.

After ending the season as the Ravens' starting center, Urschel announced on Twitter he is starting his Doctor of Philosophy degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is listed as a graduate student for Spectral Graph Theory, Numerical Linear Algebra and Machine Learning.

After reading that, it feels like Urschel is more likely to be a character on "The Big Bang Theory" than a lineman pushing a 340-pound nose tackle off the line of scrimmage.

Urschel is one of the most unique players in the game and is proving that you can be a student-athlete beyond college. The winner of the "academic Heisman" coming out of Penn State, Urschel had his research published in peer-reviewed academic journals in his spare time. His latest one was titled "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians."

SNIP

[JI7]

1. don't know much about sports or him, but i'm guessing in the long term his life will be

a lot better off because of this .

[awoke_in_2003]

2. Except for the whole concussion thing

offensive linemen take a beating.

[JI7]

3. i thought he was leaving sports for this

i guess if he gets lucky and isn't affected. but yeah, that would hurt him.

[awoke_in_2003]

4. If that is so

he had had years of what amounts to small scale cars crashes. He may not have had a lot of full blown concussions, but the small ones add up.

[dsc]

5. the article makes it sound like he isn't

though something may well have to give. Both of those are very time and energy consuming by themselves, to do both at the same time seems like a bit much.

[eppur_se_muova]

6. It wasn't "analytical algebraic topology of local Euclidian metrization of ...

infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifolds" ?

Bolzhe moi !