Jordan Ellenberg at Hmm Daily:

“I have, or had, more math talent than football talent,” Urschel tells me. “I fully believe this.” But the world is on the lookout for football players. His coaches at Canisius, an all-boys Jesuit high school, continually encouraged him to think big, bigger, biggest. If he worked at it, he could play in college. He could play in the Big Ten. There was a chance he could play in the NFL. From his math teachers? Zero.

That changed at Penn State, where Urschel enrolled in 2009 to study math and play football.