Penn State offensive guard John Urschel claimed the William V. Campbell Trophy, endowed by HealthSouth and hosted at the New York Athletic Club, on Dec. 10, 2013 at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City during the 56th NFF Annual Awards Dinner. Click here to read a release announcing Urschel as the winner, and click here to watch a video of his acceptance speech. He received a special tribute for his accomplishments when the NFF and the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) jointly honored him in front of a sold-out crowd of more than 93,000 fans during a break in the third quarter of the Jan. 6 VIZIO BCS National Championship at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif.
A team captain and a key component to one of the Big Ten’s most productive passing offenses, Urschel claimed Associated Press Third Team All-America honors, and he helped true freshman quarterback Christian Hackenberg earn the Big Ten Freshman of the Year title in 2013. A two-time First Team All-Big Ten guard, Urschel paved the way for three-straight 1,000-yard rushers and helped the Nittany Lions to winning seasons in all four years of his career. He also blocked for 3,000-yard passer Matt McGloin, who broke 10 school passing and total offense records in 2012. He contributed as a mainstay on an offensive line that led the Big Ten in total offense and ranked second in scoring and passing yards in conference play in 2012.
A Big Ten Medal of Honor recipient, Urschel garnered back-to-back First Team Academic All-America honors in 2012 and 2013 and Academic All-District honors for three straight years. He earned a bachelor’s in mathematics in May 2012, a master’s in mathematics a year later, and he is currently working on a second master’s degree in math education – all while maintaining a perfect 4.0 GPA. The Williamsville, N.Y., native is a three-time Academic All-Big Ten honoree and a Big Ten Distinguished Scholar. In 2013, Urschel was named the winner of the 84th Sullivan Award, presented by the Amateur Athletic Union to America’s top amateur athlete.
Urschel has taught college-level courses like Integral Vector Calculus and Trigonometry and Analytic Geometry and has had several research papers published, including “Instabilities of the Sun-Jupiter-Asteroid Three Body Problem” in the journal Celestial Mechanics and Dynamic Astronomy and “A Space-Time Multigrid Method for the Numerical Valuation of Barrier Options” in the journal Communications in Mathematical Finance. He jointly ran a 2013 summer program in computational mathematics, supervising two undergraduates studying Schwartz-based Finite Element methods for graph Laplacian eigenvalue problems, and is a member of a genome re-assembly research group.
Active in the community, Urschel volunteered with the Penn State Uplifting Athletes chapter, Penn State Dance Marathon, Relay for Life, Special Olympics and Make-A-Wish events.
Urschel was selected by the Baltimore Ravens in the fifth round of the 2014 NFL Draft and appeared in 11 games in 2014. In 2015, he co-authored a paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics.
