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Comment by mattikl | Hacker News Reader

I was just wondering the other day, are any of the top college athletes majoring in something demanding (in a way that it requires one to spend countless of hours learning new mental models) like CS or physics? As a European, my exposure to college sports is pretty limited, but I've never seen a major like that listed.

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If you're interested you could look to the lists of Rhodes Scholar's worldwide- the entry qualification (before selection for award) is to be triple top tier - reputable sporting positon and good academic marks and reputable public facing involvement.

Typically, in Australia say, an annual Rhodes Scholar might be a captain in a state cricket team and a viola player in the state orchestra and studying one of the STEM lines.

I could point to a Physics Prof who occassionally lectures at the Royal Institute with good sports and band camp cred from their youth .. or another teaching music in the US at a prestiguous school - but that starts to pinpoint my origins :)

https://www.rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk/scholarships/the-rhodes-sch...

That's interesting. I think it's usually pretty siloed so that people in sports, music or academia/tech are so focused mastering their own field and hang out with likeminded people. Maybe you get combination of two, but three sounds pretty uncommon.

It's mostly in former British Empire territories, but rather famously US POTUS Bill Clinto got a Rhodes (IIRC).

Cecil Rhodes kicked it off on the back of mega mineral wealth extracted from South Africa (and surrounds, back in the day), and he wanted to support well rounded students into the Oxbridge education streams to mix with future UK diplomats, business leaders, politicans to expand the global web of interconnect ...

( fill in your own dots )

It's less about being the best athlete | best musician | best mathematician .. but very much about being up there with them.

There's more than you might think.

eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myron_Rolle

Picked up in the US 2010 NFL Draft, a football playing Bahamian-American neurosurgeon.

Short list of a few notables: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Rhodes_Scholars

Full database: https://www.rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk/scholars-alumni/rhodes-scho...

In Division 1, it's rare but happens. Rather an exception. In Division 3, check out MIT, Caltech, or CMU teams. For these athletics is not a priority.

There have been men who earned PhDs in mathematics during or after NFL careers--quite recently HN had links to an obituary of Frank Ryan, who led the Cleveland Browns to their last NFL championship, and who taught at Case. More recently, John Urschel, a lineman for the Baltimore Ravens earned a Ph.D. and according to Wikipedia teaches at MIT.

I have the impression that college football was much less of a full time job in Ryan's day, but Urschel graduated from Penn State in 2012.

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