*After three seasons with the Baltimore Ravens, John Urschel decided to end his football career in 2017 to pursue a Ph.D. at MIT. The athlete, Penn State graduate, and doctoral student not only loves math, he’s quite good at it and his work has been published in numerous journals.
“That was out of the blue,” said Ravens head coach John Harbaugh. “He had been working hard. He was working on his snaps all summer. He was doing a great job. It was definitely a lightning bolt that way.”
Urschel’s salary was as high as $600,000 in 2016, but he wasn’t comfortable with his six-figure lifestyle.
“I drive a used hatchback Nissan Versa and live on less than $25,000 a year,” he said.
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Even his mom has reportedly joked about the Versa, which had 30,000 miles on it when Urschel bought it. It’s his “dream car.”
“It’s great on gas. It’s surprisingly spacious. And you know what the best feeling is? You’re driving into a parking deck, it’s near full and you’re on the first level and there is that space that everyone has passed because they said, ‘No, we can’t park in there.’ And I take my Versa and I just go right in there.”
Urschel doesn’t live modestly and drive a used car “because I’m frugal or trying to save for some big purchase,” he noted. “It’s because the things I love the most in this world (reading math, doing research, playing chess) are very, very inexpensive.”
His retirement from the NFL came just two days after a study was released showing a link between concussions and brain disease among former NFL players.
“My decision to retire early did come as a surprise to some people,” 26-year-old Urschel said. “For me, I thought about it with my family and it felt like the right decision for me. Of course, I still love football, it’s still my favorite game in the world. I was blessed to play it at the highest level, and I have experiences playing football that (I’ll) never forget. I recommend football, or any team sport to young people just to be able to experience what it’s like to be a part of a team and be a part of a group. For me personally, it felt like time to focus my efforts more on my second career to give myself the opportunity to be the best mathematician I can be.”
Urschel was recently named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in the field of science and is expecting a baby in December.
He notes that “I have the means to make a good living and provide for my family, without playing football,” he wrote on The Players’ Tribune. “I have no desire to try to accumulate $10 million in the bank; I already have more money in my bank account than I know what to do with.”
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