Chris Borland's retirement from the NFL has sparked a wave of debate in the media. Borland is just 24-years-old, and he is coming off of a very successful rookie season with the San Francisco 49ers. Still, he elected to retire from football over concerns about his long-term health.

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Other players retired this offseason even though they certainly could have continued playing, but they all had been in the league for several seasons and had earned at least a modicum of financial security. Although Borland earned a lot of money during his rookie year, he is far from set for life. There has been a lot of debate about whether other NFL players will follow in Borland's health-conscious footsteps, and at least one Baltimore Ravens player sounds like he has considered the idea, according to Bloomberg.

John Urschel plays offensive line for the Ravens, but he is also one of the smartest players in the league. He earned a 4.0 GPA at Penn State, and he is basically a math genius, having been published in a number of mathematical journals.

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He recently had another paper published in Journal of Computational Mathematics titled "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians."

If you don't know what any of that means, consider yourself part of the majority. Here is an excerpt from the paper:

Urschel is aware that his football career may impede his ability to perform high-level mathematical computations eventually, but he is not considering retirement at this time because he simply loves being able to hit people.

"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 admitted to being jealous of Chris Borland. "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."

But he does enjoy playing football. "I love hitting people," he confirms.