Math whiz Urschel ends career in football

Something about playing pro football does not add up anymore for Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman John Urschel.

Thursday, just two days after a new study revealed increasing evidence connecting the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy to the highest levels of the game, the 26-year-old retired.

The Ravens, for whom Urschel played for three seasons after starring at Penn State, made the announcement online.

“This morning John Urschel informed me of this decision to retire from football,” 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, who has not publicly commented on his decision, has a second career.

A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Urschel already has nine published or accepted research papers, according to the school’s magazine MIT Technology Review. His specialties include discrete Schrödinger operators, high dimensional data compression, algebraic multi-grid and Voronoi diagrams.

“I have never had a student like him,” Prof. Ludmil Zikatanov, who taught Urschel as an undergrad and master’s student at Penn State, told The Washington Post’s Michael S. Rosenwald last year.

Urschel’s said in the past he envisions a “bright career” for himself in mathematics. He’s also said, “I love hitting people.”

He was never shy about talking about the possible risks to his brain from playing football, and, in fact, in a 2015 essay for the Players’ Tribune, said he envied Chris Borland, who retired from the NFL at age 24 over concerns about CTE.

“Objectively, I shouldn’t [play football],” Urschel admitted in his essay.

He added, though, that his passion for the game overrode the possible risks. It’s unclear whether Urschel, who participated in all the team’s training sessions during the offseason, simply no longer feels that same passion, or if he now determined the risk to outweigh his love of the sport.

“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,” he wrote. “This is a feeling I’m (for lack of a better word) addicted to.”