At some point in their lives, plenty of people have to moonlight to make ends meet. Moonlighting as an NFL player? That sounds like it would be impossible. But former Ravens guard John Urschel was doing exactly that during the NFL season.
In between studying film and looking for defensive weaknesses, Urschel was studying for a Ph.D. at MIT full-time, unbeknownst to Baltimore.
Urschel studying at MIT was common knowledge, but people didn't know that he was doing so during the season. The assumption was that it was always an offseason gig. However, the recently retired Urschel opened up about his second job as a student, and the the 4.0 Penn State graduate told Freakonomics Radio about the logistics it took to make his double life work.
Per Sporting News:
My schedule -- to put the MIT things in perspective -- what I would do is, I would play the game on Sunday. Then from Sunday -- suppose it's a home game, one o'clock kickoff. I get home around 5:00, perhaps 5:30. From Sunday, 5:30 p.m. until Tuesday, say, 11:00 a.m. -- when I have to go into the Ravens -- all I am doing is MIT coursework and math. That is all I am doing. MIT accepted me as a Ph.D. student, but they don't have part-time Ph.D. students. If I have to finish in four years, maybe five, this is just completely infeasible if I'm only working on the Ph.D. half a year.
Urschel is right, of course. Attending MIT isn't something that players just "do." Urschel has said that he didn't retire from the NFL for any reason outside of mathematics, despite the curious timing of his retirement (a new CTE study was released shortly before his abrupt retirement).
Looking at his schedule, it makes sense why it got to be too much. Both sides apparently tried to accommodate and make it work, but being an NFL player is so demanding that it would have been difficult (to say the least) to keep both gigs going simultaneously. In spite of the difficulties, Urschel managing to do both for so long is truly impressive, and a testament to how much both things meant to him.
