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John Urschel's Excellent MIT Offseason

Shalise Manza Young
·Columnist

Earlier this year, we told you Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman John Urschel was beginning his pursuit of a Ph.D in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the foremost math and science schools in the country.

Well, Urschel didn't just attend classes, he crushed them, according to one of his recent tweets.

As an undergraduate and graduate student at Penn State, Urschel had a perfect 4.0 grade-point average, and so far his time at MIT is trending the same way.

During his time on campus, Urschel worked out with the MIT football team. The Division III program can't offer scholarships, and even if the coaches recruit a player, they have to hope he's good enough to get into the college. Yet the team posted a 10-1 mark in 2014.

But that doesn't mean Urschel couldn't learn something from the Engineers (of course they're called the Engineers). He wrote about his time with the team for The Players' Tribune:

Which is how I found myself running sprints on Monday mornings this spring with the Engineers. I am a 310-pound offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens. I probably had about fifty or sixty pounds on the biggest guy on MIT’s O-line. But when we ran, they put me to shame. They could outsprint me.

...

On the teams I had played for in high school, college and the pros, football came first. If a meeting was scheduled, you had to be there. Workouts were mandatory. Practice time was almost sacrosanct. At Penn State, Joe Paterno would say that if you were five minutes early, then you were late. You could never be late. In college we planned our coursework around our practice schedule. There were rewards, of course: money in the NFL; status in college and high school; the roar of 100,000 people.

At MIT, most practices are in the morning before classes begin, or during the school-wide activities window from 5 to 7 p.m. MIT actually sets aside time for students to stop studying. If a player has to miss practice, or if he shows up late because he was busy with his schoolwork, there is no punishment and there are no questions. The weight room is about 1/20th the size of the weight room in the football building at Penn State — and it’s for all 33 varsity sports. The strength coach for all the teams, a great guy named Tim Viall, is also the football team’s offensive coordinator and offensive line coach. For much of the day, the weight room is empty and shut.

I didn’t know what to expect. But what I found was that the team at MIT is no joke. It is a football team — in some ways, more of a football team than any I’d ever seen. These guys love football. They are playing the game because they want to. No one is making them come to practice, no one is checking up on them. They know as well as anyone about head injuries; they know that football is dangerous; they know the feeling of exhaustion and pain. They still play. They don’t do it for money, and they don’t do it for status. The average size of their crowds is fewer than 1,000. On campus, no one gives them a second look. (The guys who won the Putnam Competition — a national math contest — three years in a row are the ones who get treated like star quarterbacks.) But they show up every day and work hard because it’s their choice — because they love to play.

We talk a lot about dedication and passion in the pros, but the truth is, sometimes the game feels like a job. You start to think of the paycheck. You feel the grind. But training with the team at MIT, I started thinking about what had drawn me to football as a kid. It felt like a game again. I had thought I might have something to teach the team. I never imagined they’d have so much to teach me.

Urschel wrote that his mother dreamed of him playing for MIT and becoming a rocket scientist when he left high school, while he wanted to be Michigan's Jake Long. Seven years later, they both have a little bit of what they wanted.