Baltimore Ravens Guard Drives a Used Versa

Achieving a position, any position, in the National Football League as a player is a huge accomplishment for any athlete. Doing so as a draft pick for the starting lineup for a team like the Ravens is even bigger. Hitting $500,000-plus payday on contract is getting top-tier. His contract, if fulfilled, pays a total of $2.3 million through 2017.

Yet Urschel, who has achieved all of that, still shows up to practice in a 2013 Nissan Versa and lives with a roommate to cut expenses. Why? His tweets, jokingly sent from the Raven’s parking lot, show that his teammates have no problem spending their lofty incomes on big vehicles from Ford and Ram. So what’s different about this rookie guard?

He’s a mathematician. Picked in the fifth round o the NFL Draft last year, Urschel left school to pursue his career in football. That sounds like the typical athlete’s story on its surface, but this player left school with a Master’s Degree in mathematics, which he earned while also teaching integral vector calculus trigonometry (yes, it’s as hard as its name implies). Urschel has also published academic work in the Journal of Computational Mathematics.

So it’s clear that Urschel is not stupid. He may be 6-foot 3-inches tall and weigh in excess of 300 pounds and play professional sports, but this football player is no mindless brute. He bought his 2013 Nissan Versa used for $9,000 and says it’s his “dream car” because it’s the right size, frugal on gas, and it’s paid for. Plus, he notes, it parks in spaces that many other vehicles have to skip, giving him an advantage in parking garages and tight lots.

By the way, Urschel’s Twitter feed (MathMeetsFball) is full of photos of him with his car, a chalkboard, and encouragement for kids to play sports and learn math.

Sourced from Yahoo Finance.