Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football by John Urschel and Louisa Thomas
I stumbled across John’s book in my Amazon search for some preseason college football reading material. I had remembered him being featured on BTN and knew he had an interesting background and story that would be different than the standard biography about a legendary coach or player.
Published by Penguin Press in 2019 in a compact 236 pages, John provides an alternating narrative of his mathematical and football journey from Canisius High School, an all-boys Jesuit school in western New York, to Penn State, the NFL and then MIT as a PhD candidate.
John was a product of both hardship and opportunity. His parents divorcing when he was three, he grew up with his mother while his father, a surgeon, relocated back to his native home in Canada. She would have to do the things all single mothers do to see their sons succeed, work hard, be an example, fight for opportunity and provide a pathway for success.
John’s mother valued education and feed his interests in puzzles and with books and brain games during his early years, while football was something he discovered on his in own through a desire to fit in with his peers and inspiration from an old photograph of his dad.
For someone so gifted in two different spheres of life John comes across amazingly human and normal. He describes himself as having less “raw athletic talent” than others, yet he becomes a starter for Big Ten team and an NFL draft pick. He attempts to simplify and relate advanced mathematical concepts – proofs, graph theory, spectral bisection. While an essential part of his story and part of what makes the book interesting, there are limits as to what the reader can absorb.
John describes a coming-of-age mathematical moment when a professor challenged a class to find the roots of a fifth-order polynomial equation. John stunned the professor with the answer.
The professor asked, “How did you solve it?” John’s response, “I just did.”
Afterwards “something had awakened” within him and he realized that his mathematical ability might be something special.
Likewise, a defining moment in football and perhaps his manhood occurred when he decided to stay a Penn State after the 2012 season with Jerry Sandusky turmoil. He did this even though he had already graduated from Penn State, had an academic scholarship to Stanford (his mother’s dream school), would be admitted to the PhD program, receive a stipend, and play football.
There are plenty of football nuggets to scratch the football itch – getting recruited by Jim Harbaugh at Stanford, going through the Jerry Sandusky tragedy, getting concussed by Terrell Suggs, and deciding to walk away from the game as a member of the Baltimore Ravens. But the focus is on the full person John Urschel – a real student-athlete that the NCAA would no doubt like to highlight.
It was said of John in one of his scouting reports, “Highly intelligent – will be successful with or without football.” There are many football players who are intelligent off the field, few who seem to embrace it like him.
