My ex-BIL went to college on a basketball scholarship. He became an electrical engineer. When his entire department was eliminated in the 1990s, he went back to school, got a teaching certificate, taught at a middle school, earned a Ph.D., and was hired as a faculty member at a major state university. So far, he’s the only one in the immediate family other than my late father to have earned a Ph.D.
Regarding stereotypes, we seldom hear about the people who have been mentioned in this thread. They live quiet successful lives. It is the ones who punch their fiancées in the face and drag them through a hotel lobby that gets the media hype.
I would bet that the list of successful in life college athletes is far, far, far, longer than the ones that get talked about on most of the anti-athlete threads.
What do you mean, seldom hear? The press eats up these guys! Not that they aren’t impressive.
Doug Glanville had a decent career in major league baseball. He had an engineering degree from Penn, and I doubt there was a game in which that wasn’t mentioned during at least one of his at-bats.
Of course, it’s not limited to sports. A young man my kids knew at their dance school dropped out of college after one year to be a professional dancer, and was a principal with a national company for almost a decade. When his dance career ended, he went back to college, and is now a PhD student in linguistics. There was a guy in a successful pop-punk band who had a PhD in chemical engineering, and I know someone who was a moderately successful cult rock star who supported herself in part by doing SAT tutoring, and got a law degree at Northwestern while pursuing her music career. She’s a human rights litigator at The Hague now. Carrie Brownstein, of Sleater-Kinney and Portlandia fame, was accepted into the anthropology PhD program at Penn, but decided at the last minute to stay with her band. Adam Duritz of Counting Crows was an English PhD student at Berkeley (one of the strongest English departments in the world) when his music career took of, and David Duchovny was a PhD student in the Yale English department (probably the top program in the world when he was there).
@JHS Pulling the thread off topic.
Anyway the thread should be “Nerds go against stereotype and play football”.
What’s off topic? Football players are the only people stereotyped as nonacademic? Football players are especially dumb compared to punk rockers or actors, so it’s especially interesting when one turns out not to be dumb?
It’s not really news when football players are smart.
Hockey players, on the other hand . . . I don’t remember too many articles about their PhDs. Love Story notwithstanding.
Or similarly, nerds go against stereotype and excel in physically demanding occupations…whether its athletics like in OP or say…as combat-arms soldiers/officers. Have a few in my extended family and many more among HS classmates, colleagues, and acquaintances*.
- Infantry(Army & Marine), Aviation, Armor***, Subs, etc.
** A couple of fellow Linuxworld convention attendees from over a decade ago with whom I struck up a brief conversation on Linux distros and its uses in real-world situations were Marine officers in uniform…a Captain in infantry and a First Lieutenant who flew combat helicopters. Not surprisingly, both were CS majors with one from Annapolis and another from RPI. The latter school was also one where an older cousin also attended as an engineering/CS major and did NROTC before doing a stint as a Naval Aviator.
*** One older HS alum who graduated sometime in the early-mid-'80s attended West Point as an engineering major and became a commissioned officer in armor. He wrote a brief article of his combat experiences as the CO of a tank company in our HS newspaper a year or two after Desert Storm during my early HS years partly to encourage more of us to consider the FSAs.
And let’s not forget about RPI Bioengineering alumnus Andrew Franks, the kicker for the Miami Dolphins. I Saw him play at RPI. You will be watching him this weekend in the playoffs. And then there was that Rhodes Scholar and lineman from Florida State a few years ago. How’d that happen? LOL
John Elway has a degree in finance from Stanford. He had a wonderful career on the field and at the same time made a fortune in auto dealerships and endorsements. Now he runs the team and owns restaurants. Not too bad.
Payton is doing the same thing (don’t know what his degree is in from Tennessee). Makes a ton from commercials and wants to be a general manager.
SEC quarterback AND a rocket scientist, the University of Tennessee’s Josh Dobbs:
I worry about these guys getting conked on the head and having trouble with the hard math/science/medicine studies. I hope they have those good new helmets!!
ETA: I just read the second link in the first OP post and in fact, JU did get a concussion and it led to a “discussion with his coach” but it’s unclear what came of that.
Don’t forget about all those football players and athletes who attend schools like Colorado School of Mines, South Dakota Mines, etc where every player is a STEM major.
John Urschel has retired from football:
https://www.si.com/nfl/2017/11/21/john-urschel-nfl-ravens-mit-mathematics
https://www.si.com/mmqb/video/2017/11/21/john-urschel-baltimore-ravens-retirement
@JHS well, Ken Dryden( Cornell, McGill)was no dummy, as well as being a HOF goalie.
Kerry Lightenberg was a closer for the Atlanta Braves, and got a degree in Chemical Engineering from U of MN.
Just saw that Laurent Duvernay-TardifKansas City Chiefs)got his MD’s(actually called a MDCM) license from Mcgill, which is a notoriously rigorous school for Medicine.
@57special Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid was very accommodating to Duvernay-Tardif. It turns out that the coach’s mother was a doctor…who received her MDCM form McGill!
@TomSrOfBoston small world!
Surprising no one has mentioned Pete Dawkins yet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Dawkins