There's obviously no "off" in the offseason for Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman John Urschel. After ending the season as the Ravens' starting center, Urschel announced on Twitter that he is starting a Doctor of Philosophy degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is listed as a graduate student for courses in spectral graph theory, numerical linear algebra and machine learning.

Urschel, who started seven games on the Ravens' offensive line in 2015, is one of the most unique players in the game and is proving that you can be a student-athlete beyond college. The winner of the "academic Heisman" coming out of Penn State, Urschel has had research published in peer-reviewed journals; his latest paper is titled "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians."

In June he visited the National Security Agency to discuss his passion at MathFest. After sustaining a concussion in August, Urschel worked on high-level math problems to see where he stood. The amazing part is that Urschel is doing all this while becoming a rising offensive lineman for the Ravens. In his first two seasons he stepped up when injured starters went down, starting five games at guard as a rookie (including two in the playoffs) and seven games at center in 2015. There was a chance he would become a full-time starter in 2016 if Kelechi Osemele wasn't re-signed in free agency. It would be interesting to see his two worlds converge if he earns the right to be announced in pregame introductions as "Dr. John Urschel."

John Urschel, an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, recently co-authored a paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics titled "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians," which presents a cascadic multigrid algorithm for fast computation of the Fiedler vector — the eigenvector corresponding to the second-smallest eigenvalue of a graph Laplacian. I understand almost none of the words in that sentence, and probably never will; the rest of the study is similarly dense. Highlights: Urschel, drafted in 2014 to block for Joe Flacco, had a 4.0 GPA at Penn State, has been published in several mathematical journals, is an accomplished chess player, and, for a living, uses his body as a bulldozer. His family, he says, wonders why he would spend his time in such a way. The answer is, apparently, that he just enjoys leveling people. Happy Pi Day! Take some time to check out all of its properties and the amazing things it's involved in. My favorite is Euler's identity. — John Urschel (@MathMeetsFball) March 14, 2015

"There’s a rush you get when you go out on the field, lay everything on the line and physically dominate the player across from you. This is a feeling I’m (for lack of a better word) addicted to," wrote Urschel in a post this week on The Players' Tribune. Urschel said he was jealous of Chris Borland, the San Francisco 49ers linebacker who retired from football this month at the age of 24 because he was worried about head trauma. "Playing a hitting position in the NFL can’t possibly help your long-term mental health," Urschel acknowledged, before rattling off a list of reasons why his mental health might be particularly valuable, including a "bright career ahead of me in mathematics." The problem is that Urschel likes to crush his peers too much. ("I love hitting people," he confirms.) Too bad you can't hit people with pi.