Due to his wife, a significant Baltimore player has formally announced his retirement
John Urschel, an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, feels that something about being a professional football player is no longer valid.
The 26-year-old retired just two days after a new study found more evidence linking the degenerative brain condition chronic traumatic encephalopathy to the top levels of the game.
Urschel’s three-season team, the Ravens, announced the news online.
Urschel has a second career planned; he has not made any public comments about his choice. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s magazine, MIT Technology Review, Urschel, a PhD candidate in mathematics, has nine research publications to his credit that have either been accepted or published.
Discrete Schrödinger operators, algebraic multigrids, Voronoi diagrams, and high-dimensional data compression are among his areas of expertise.
“I have never had a student like him,” Urschel’s Penn State undergraduate and graduate advisor, Prof. Ludmil Zikatanov, said to The Washington Post in the previous year.
Urschel has previously stated that he hopes to have a “bright career” in mathematics. But he has also admitted, “I love hitting people.”
He has never held back when discussing the potential harm that playing football could do to his brain. In fact, he expressed his envy of Chris Borland, who left the NFL at the age of 24 due to CTE, in a 2015 essay for the Players’ Tribune.
In his essay, Urschel said, “Objectively, I shouldn’t [play football].” However, he said, his love for the game outweighed any potential dangers.
“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 said. “This is a feeling I’m (for lack of a better word) addicted to, and I’m hard-pressed to find anywhere else.”
