Penn State's John Urschel has love for math and football

Erik Brady | USA TODAY Sports

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- John Urschel arrived at the Penn State football building one morning last week in a T-shirt. That's hardly unusual sartorial fare for a Big Ten lineman, though the message on it surely is.

There are 10 kinds of people: Those who understand binary and those who don't.

If you don't understand, Urschel will cheerfully explain that in a binary numeral system the symbol 10 (or one, zero) means two.

This is just the sort of antic drollery that would crack up fictional theoretical physicists Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter, geeks at the heart of the popular sitcom The Big Bang Theory, which happens to be a favorite TV show of the 307-pound man wearing the size XXL math joke.

Urschel, 22, is a rarity in college, let alone major-college football. The first-team all-Big Ten guard earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics in three years, a master's in math in his fourth year and now, as he enters his fifth year, is working on his second master's, in math education — all while carrying a 4.0 grade-point average.

He plans to pursue a doctorate someday, too, but first he'd like to play in the NFL for, oh, a dozen years or so. Penn State coach Bill O'Brien thinks he can.

"John is strong. He's smart. He's durable. He's flexible," he says. "Usually with bright guys like that, it doesn't necessarily convert to a high football IQ. But John has one, and that's why he can play at the next level."

Urschel will give the keynote address at the Big Ten Kickoff Luncheon in Chicago on Thursday. Last year that honor went to Michigan's Denard Robinson and the year before to Michigan State's Kirk Cousins. They were quarterbacks. Urschel blocks for quarterbacks. Guys who wear numbers like 64 are not typically selected for headliner acts.

You could say his number is perfect for him — 8 to the power of 2 is a perfect square and 4 to the power of 3 is a perfect cube, fitting matches for his perfect GPA.

"It's a very nice number," Urschel says of 64. "I like the number. It works for me."

Venita Parker, his mother, recalls his affinity for numbers began when he was 4 or 5 and growing up in suburban Buffalo. She'd buy educational toys for children twice his age and he'd master them in a matter of days.

"I'd go back to Toys 'R' Us for more," she says, "and they'd say, 'What — you again?'"

She sent him to Canisius High School, a Jesuit prep school, and there he found a second passion in football. Four years later fellow students voted him Mr. Canisius for exemplifying school ideals.

"My mother wanted me to go to MIT," Urschel says. "I wanted bigger football. We settled on Princeton."

But midway through his senior year, scholarship offers arrived from three major programs: Penn State, Stanford and Boston College. Urschel visited Penn State and loved it. Five years later you can find him on posters and in videos for the school's "Faces of Penn State" campaign, which highlights accomplished persons from across the campus, and across the years, who represent institutional values of teaching, research and service. He's a sort of Mr. Penn State.

For so many years football coach Joe Paterno was the university's face. Today, Penn State is emerging from the myriad agonies of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal. Among the fallout are NCAA sanctions that make the football team ineligible for bowl games. Players were given a chance to transfer without sitting out a season. Urschel says he never gave it a thought — either time.

Urschel, you see, was free to leave even before the sanctions. Athletes who graduate with eligibility remaining can transfer without penalty to schools offering graduate degrees unavailable at their current schools.

"Penn State does not have a graduate program in applied mathematics," Urschel says. "But for me, it was never a question. I love my university, and I love my team."

Thinking ahead

Urschel is checking his watch as he answers a news reporter's questions. He has a full day planned. It started with a team meeting at 6 a.m. He lifted weights for an hour at 6:30. Then he had breakfast and a little downtime before his interview with USA TODAY Sports at 11 a.m. Now he had to be off to a noon speaking engagement. (Later he'd run a two-hour tutoring session and then sit for a photo shoot.)

Associate communications director Brian Siegrist proffers a blue Penn State polo and suggests Urschel slip it on over his math-joke shirt, as there will be ESPN cameras filming his lecture. Urschel complies.

He walks into a classroom filled with two dozen or so incoming freshmen in the Millennium Scholars program, for students committed to pursuing a doctoral program in science or engineering. They eat pepperoni pizza and pepper Urschel with questions.

Are you going to play in the NFL? You look like you could. Yes, he says, he wants to.

How do you balance football and studies? "It comes easy," he says, "when you love what you do."

Did you ever need a tutor? Just once, he says, for a public speaking course. Left unsaid: Now he speaks to dozens in classrooms — and thousands in ballrooms.

What's your GPA? He shrugs. "I have a 4," he says quietly, and there are gasps and wide eyes around the room. He tells them they might not believe him, but he never worries about grades.

Are his friends from football or math? "I get to enjoy both their worlds," he says. "It would be a shame if I restricted myself to just one. I don't put myself in a box."

Why not pursue his doctorate first? He says he can't begin an NFL career at 30, and he'd regret it if he passed on the opportunity to play the game at its highest level.

What about concussions? The subtext of this question is clear: Your brain is your ticket. Why put it at risk? He tells them risk is part of the game, and he accepts it.

Urschel writes his e-mail address on the blackboard. If anyone has more questions, anytime, just ask, he says. He poses for pictures with each freshman, one at a time, and there are shining smiles all around for the big group shot. He is a football hero and one of them, all at once.

"I'm not going to lie," says Luke Gockowski of Gettysburg, Pa., who'll major in mechanical engineering. "That was awesome."

Balancing two worlds

O'Brien tells a story about spring practice. He has a color-coded chart to keep track of which players will come to practice late, or leave early, for class.

"Green is freshmen, blue is sophomores, red is juniors, yellow is seniors," he says. "And then I see purple. I've never seen that before. So I ask our academic guy, 'What's purple?' He tells me, 'That's Urschel. He's not taking a class. He's teaching one.'"

Urschel taught Math 041 — Trigonometry and Analytic Geometry — to undergrads three days a week in the spring semester. O'Brien has not witnessed Urschel in action in the classroom but he's seen the pictures of him at a blackboard chalking up labyrinthine equations, like Russell Crowe's fevered mathematician in A Beautiful Mind.

"The things 'Ursch' does," O'Brien says, shaking his head, "it's mind-boggling."

But, coach, you're in the blackboard business, too, with X's and O's.

"Yeah," O'Brien says, "but his chalk talks are in another galaxy."

Actually, they're rooted right here in this one. Urschel had a paper published this year in the journal Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy. Its title has the ring of something Sheldon Cooper might peruse for a little light reading: Instabilities in the Sun-Jupiter-Asteroid Three Body Problem.

Ask Urschel for a simplified summary of his paper, and he'll patiently take you through a scholarly three-minute exposition — and you won't understand a word. But at least now you get the binary gag. Hey, it's easier to understand 10 as two than the Big Ten as 14.

You could say that Urschel leads a binary life: math and football. There isn't time for much else. Even his Twitter handle is @mathmeetsfball.

"With football and math, I'm very precise," he says. "With everything else, I'm a simple guy." His favorite ice cream at Penn State's famed creamery is not Peachy Paterno or Wicked Caramel Sundae. "Straight vanilla," he says.

Urschel also leads a binary social life: football friends and math friends, just as he told those inquisitive freshmen.

"My football friends sit around, watch some sports on TV, get on each other's cases, laugh, it's a hang-out type atmosphere," Urschel says. "You know, what normal 20- or 22-year-old college kids do.

"My math friends, it's more adult-like, you could say. A lot of them are older, grad students, late 20s. A couple of months ago we had a murder mystery dinner at somebody's house. Or they'll do one of those role-playing games with a board and dice."

Doesn't that make them, um, nerds?

"You can call them that if you'd like," Urschel says. "I wouldn't."

But, come on, aren't those just the sorts of games Cooper and Hofstadter play with their friends?

"If you watch The Big Bang Theory, it's a lot more like that than you'd really think," Urschel says. "That's the reason I think that show is so funny. There's so much truth in it."

Follow Erik Brady on Twitter: @ByErikBrady