Pro football player and MIT doctoral student John Urschel may represent an unusual combination of abilities and interests, but he told an audience of math students and faculty at the University of Delaware recently that he’s not that complicated.

“I think people’s motivations are usually pretty simple,” the offensive lineman for the NFL’s Ravens said at UD on Friday. “I love football, and I love math, so it’s simple for me. This is the life I want to lead.”

That life, he said, encompasses the two activities, with little time for anything else. He trains and plays football in Baltimore, and he pursues a doctorate in applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“I do math, and I play football, and that’s about it,” Urschel said. “It’s not the life that everyone would want, but it’s what I want. The NFL pays the bills, but math will be my life for a long time.”

His visit to UD was focused on math. Although Urschel hasn’t yet narrowed down his doctoral research topic, his talk at the University was on the subject of “Trace Theorems and Drawings of Planar Graphs.”

In explaining the subject to an outsider before his lecture, he began by describing discrete graphs as “dot and line” arrangements in a plane, such as a tabletop. They can be seen as similar to a network, like Facebook, where the problem lies in connecting the dots by drawing lines that don’t cross one another. The more discrete items — the dots — there are, the harder that problem of connecting them becomes.

“How do you best draw it? How do you represent it?” Urschel asked. In his lecture, he gave several examples of different techniques for drawing such graphs.

Most questions from the audience concerned the mathematical work he was describing. But at the end of the lecture, students and faculty also asked about his football career.

At Penn State, where he played and also earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics, Urschel said his teammates welcomed his academic skills as he became a kind of unofficial math tutor for the football team. In the NFL, he said, no one really cares what a player does off the field as long as he is ready and able to play his best on game days.

And at MIT, his friends seem to “think it’s cool that one of their own has crossed over” into the world of athletics, he said.

Urschel entered Penn State with plans to study aerospace engineering, but as a sophomore he was encouraged by a professor to pursue math research beyond what was being covered in class. “I fell in love with math instantly,” he said.

Today, he said, he still feels that way about the subject he’s studying at MIT.

“I’m not done with football yet, but NFL careers are short, and after I’m retired, I want to be a math professor,” said Urschel, who will be starting his fourth season with the Ravens this year. “I love doing math. I love coming across a problem I can’t quite figure out and working at it and working at it … I love the elegance of math.”