What the heck was Corey Liuget thinking?

He’s a professional football player – and not the kind who might need to get a job when the game is done with him. He’s the kind with seven zeroes and a couple commas on his bank statement.

Really, what possessed Liuget to spend parts of the past five springs – his downtime between playing a sport that has at various times wrecked his foot and his knee and made it so his shoulder required surgery and made him dizzy and left him bruised more Mondays than are numerable – going to college?

“The most important thing was for my family,” Liuget said Monday. “For my kids, when they get older they will know their daddy had the opportunity at age 21 to go make a ton of money, and I did. And then I went back to school. I’m 26-years-old, and I got my college degree. I worked my tail off to get it. It was for me to set a precedent.”


That – and that he long ago told his mom he would graduate from college – is what Liuget was thinking.

It’s why the Chargers defensive end made a half-dozen or more trips between San Diego and Champaign, Ill., each NFL offseason to complete the 38 units he was shy of his sociology degree when he left the University of Illinois in 2011 to become a millionaire at age 21.

“It was hard,” Liuget said Monday, a day after he participated in commencement ceremonies, a Sociology degree in hand. “There were times, in the beginning, I thought, ‘I’m not going to make it through this crap. This is too hard. I don’t need to do this.”

By the end of the six terms (he took online courses one summer), his determination was the type that is characterized by a steely defiance.


The professor in one class this last semester told his star athlete pupil at the outset that if he was not there, he would fail.

The challenge for Liuget was not just in the commute but in the commitments.

See, he has a demanding job and three children under the age of 5.

He needed to be at Chargers Park more this offseason. Coming off the first season in his career in which he did not make it through to the end, Liuget is committed to making 2017 a full and productive season. But he needed to pass that class in order to graduate.


“I just made sure I came to campus and did well on each and every test, every mid-term, final, every presentation, pop quizzes,” Liuget said, “so when he did knock me down for attendance my grades would be strong enough.”

The final grades haven’t posted, but Liuget is confident he aced Sociology 480.

“I’m pretty sure I got an ‘A,’ ” he said. “It will probably be a ‘B’ after he takes into account my absences.”


As Liuget told the story by phone, making the drive from Lindbergh Field to Chargers Park on Monday morning, there is something in his voice like pride and a little bit of anger. Not like he was angry he had to go to class, more like he was pleased he had been provoked into that kind of accomplishment.

Sociology 480 was part of a final semester in which all of his classes had to be taken on campus. Most of the classes the previous spring had been in Champaign, too. Liuget doesn’t hide the fact that circumstance contributed to his swelling to 314 pounds last season.

“I’d be there for 10 days,” he said, “eating whatever I wanted to, having fun like I was in college all over again.”

He had played that heavy before, but he feels he’s been his best when below 300.


Under the same conditions this spring, he has shed about 12 pounds and is looking to drop about 10 more before the season.

Liuget is a bit prideful. Maybe you can tell. He knows his play so far has been good but short of great. It’s been clear for some time Liuget wants to be better than he is.

Football is why so many people know of him. It is what he gets paid for.

As the 18th overall pick in the 2011 draft, Liuget made more than $8 million on his rookie contract. Last June, he signed an extension that guarantees him $30 million and could pay him more than $50 million over the next five years.


That’s more than enough money for many (most) of us to say school was out for summer. Forever.

But here is what Liuget, a kid from a part of Miami where not everyone makes it to college or even to their 26th birthday, believes he learned along with all that sociology:

“It just helped me understand no matter where I go in life, how much success I have, I was nothing without sacrificing and going back to get my degree,” he said. “It was just something I always wanted to accomplish. I had friends who dropped out of high school dropped out of college, some are dead, in jail. I’ve been the chosen one to get out of the situation I was in. … This is the best thing I could have possibly done.”

For himself. But more for those he is leading.


Maybe his daughter, Eden, will one day see the photos taken Sunday in which her father, still in his cap and gown, is holding her. Maybe she will decide she thinks education is important too. Liuget said Monday, maybe his children will get a Masters or doctorate degree.

That, for whatever Liuget accomplishes in his time in the NFL, is priceless. And it makes Corey Liuget a great thinker.