Florida State safety Myron Rolle was awarded a Rhodes scholarship Saturday. He is the first major-college football player of his generation to win what is considered the world’s most prestigious postgraduate academic scholarship.

He became the most prominent student-athlete to win the award since Bill Bradley at Princeton in 1965. Bradley was later a Knicks star, a senator and a presidential candidate. Other winners have included Pat Haden (U.S.C. and the Rams) and Tom McMillen (Maryland and the N.B.A. and Congress).

Rolle’s quest to the win the Rhodes had received heavy attention from the news media because he chose to risk missing all or part of Florida State’s pivotal game at Maryland on Saturday night to have the interview, which took place in Birmingham, Ala.

Rolle received the news about 5 p.m.; he then received a police escort to a local airport, where a private plane waited to take him to the game. He entered the game late in the second quarter of a 37-3 victory. “He is flying high,” Sally Karioth, a Florida State nursing professor who accompanied Rolle to his interview, said before the game. “He was hopping. He’s usually real sedate.”