Penn State Football: John Urschel To Retire From The NFL

Former Nittany Lion and current Baltimore Ravens’ center John Urschel is set to retire from the NFL.

“This morning John Urschel informed me of his decision to retire from football,” Head Coach John Harbaugh said in a statement. “We respect John and respect his decision. We appreciate his efforts over the past three years and wish him all the best in his future endeavors.”

Urschel has yet to comment on the reasoning behind his decision, but it comes just two days following a New York Times study on the impact football has had on the brains of former NFL players. Currently a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), it’s safe to say Urschel’s brain matters to him perhaps more than the average person.

Currently Urschel is working on math in the area of spectral graph theory, numerical PDE’s, matrix algebra, computational finance, mathematical physics and others. He currently has the fastest eigensolver for minimal Laplacian eigenvectors.

Whatever that means.

In an article written for the Players’ Tribune in 2015, entitled “Why I Still Play Football,” Urschel described at the time why he still took the field.

“I play because I love the game. I love hitting people,” Urschel wrote then. “There’s a rush you get when you go out on the field, lay everything on the line and physically dominate the player across from you. This is a feeling I’m (for lack of a better word) addicted to, and I’m hard-pressed to find anywhere else.”