Former Baltimore Ravens Center John Urschel Returns to MIT to Teach After Three Seasons

Former Baltimore Ravens center John Urschel retired on July 27, 2017, at the age of 26 after playing three seasons, and subsequently shifted his focus to mathematics. He was selected by the Ravens in the fifth round of the 2014 draft, playing on the offensive line with a four-year contract worth $2,364,560, including a $600,000 salary in his first year and a signing bonus of $144,560.

At Penn State, he earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics with a cumulative GPA of 4.0, completing his bachelor's in three years and teaching undergraduate courses in trigonometry and analytic geometry. His thesis, "The Instability of the Sun-Jupiter-Asteroid Three-Body Problem," was published in "Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy." He received the Campbell Trophy, known as the academic Heisman, and the Sullivan Award, given to outstanding amateur athletes in the U.S.

In the spring of 2016, he quietly registered for a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at MIT, attending classes midweek and playing games on Sundays. A concussion from a collision in 2015 affected his ability to do mathematics; he stated it took about three weeks to recover enough to play, with higher-level visualization taking even longer to recover. Before retiring, he had already published or was writing papers in areas including spectral graph theory, matrix algebra, and computational finance.

On the day of his retirement, he informed head coach John Harbaugh of his decision. At the time, he was in the last year of his rookie contract, which was not guaranteed. He later recalled that had he played another year, he would have earned at least $1 million, and he had prepared to compete for the starting center position. He publicly stated that there was no big news, that the decision was not easy, but it was the right one for him. A few days later, a case study on brain injuries was published, and he later mentioned that the concussion was a factor, as it could ruin his mathematical career.

He completed his Ph.D. in 2021. During this time, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, researching graph theory, numerical analysis, and machine learning; in 2019, he published a memoir titled "Mind and Matter," which made it onto the New York Times bestseller list; and in 2017, he was named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 in Science. In 2023, he returned to MIT as a tenure-track assistant professor in the mathematics department, not an associate professor.

There are no new trading targets. The seller is professional football: the team is short one center, and he has remaining years on his contract; the buyer is the academic job market in mathematics. The event is driven by the risks of concussions and academic preferences, with funding shifting from field salaries to research positions. Benefiting are departments needing personnel in graph theory and numerical linear algebra, while teams that treat players' physical longevity as a renewable asset are under pressure.

In later interviews, he stated that he misses the environment of discussing mathematics; looking back, football ranks behind mathematics and raising children, and both of the first two are tangible burdens. Reports in 2025 still refer to him as an assistant professor at MIT, preparing to teach an introduction to linear algebra.

Source: Public Information