Do the math: Football in the fall, Ph.D studies in the winter for Ravens’ John Urschel

OWINGS MILLS, Md. — Most NFL players use the offseason to spend time with family, go on vacation or simply relax and unwind from a long and stressful season.

John Urschel studies math.

The Ravens offensive lineman enrolled in a Ph.D math program at M.I.T. last February, earning straight As in his first semester.

High-level math is something many people would not traditionally associate with football players, but for Urschel, balancing the two passions was easier than adding two plus two.

“I did the same thing all through college,” Urschel said after practice on Thursday. “Granted, M.I.T. might have been a little harder than Penn State, but it wasn’t too bad. I had enough time for football, enough time for math. It is something I’ve been doing for a long time.”

Urschel got both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in math while at Penn State. He earned a 4.0 GPA while teaching undergrad classes and publishing an astronomy paper entitled “Instabilities in the Sun-Jupiter-Asteroid Three Body Problem.”

Yeah, and he was a third-team All-American under Joe Paterno and Bill O’Brien.

Last offseason, he published another paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics entitled “A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians.”

Kinda makes the wild verbiage of an offense sound like a children’s book in comparison.

Starting his Ph.D at one of the top academic schools in the world was nothing to Urschel.

“I had a lot more free time than I did in college,” said Urschel, whose official focus at M.I.T. is spectral graph theory, numerical linear algebra and machine learning.

But now, that free time has pretty much disappeared as NFL training camp has begun. Urschel figures to be the starter at left guard as the replacement for Kelechi Osemele, who signed with the Raiders in free agency. He also has taken some reps at center behind Jeremy Zuttah, and the coaching staff likes what they have seen so far.

“To be a good offensive lineman, everybody talks about what it takes, it’s really consistency and fundamentals, being able to do the correct things at a high percentage,” offensive line coach Juan Castillo said. “He is a percentage guy, so we say if he can do everything well at 90 percent, he is going to be a really good player. Right now, I would probably say – if I told him – I’d say he’s at about 80 percent, as far as his technique being correct.”

“He always has a hat in a hat, his fundamentals are almost always perfect, and he’s also a pretty darn good athlete,” head coach John Harbaugh said. “Sometimes, maybe the math makes you think he’s not a good athlete, but he combines the intellect with the athleticism. He’s good.”

Urschel said he approaches his third NFL camp the same as he did as a rookie and is excited for a chance to start.

“The difference is I’m a better player,” said Urschel, who has started 10 games in two years since being drafted in the fifth round in 2014. “I’m more savvy. I get to work on finer things. I have a better understanding of what I’m good at and what I’m not. But at the end of the day, I come into camp trying to make the team, trying to feed my family and then trying to help this team win, however I can in whatever role that may be. My rookie year, that was just trying to make the team, trying to back up and start when someone got hurt. Same thing last year. This year, I have the chance to play in a starting role, and I’m very much looking forward to that if I have the opportunity.”

For now, it’s all about “Green Right Strong Slot Spider 2 Y Banana” instead of asteroids, laplacians and the spector of graphs.

Those books aren’t going anywhere. They should still be around, as Urschel put it, in “hopefully mid-February.”

By Nick Klopsis

nicholas.klopsis@newsday.com@nickklopsis

Nick Klopsis is Newsday.com's sports editor. He often can be found studying NFL and college football film for his latest draft breakdown.