Good column here from ESPN.com’s Ivan Maisel about Patrick Witt’s decision to leave behind potential glory as the starting quarterback at football-mad Nebraska in favor of Yale and potential glory years after his playing career is over. A snippet:
Witt arrived at Nebraska in 2007 with 15 AP credits. He found a locker room, he said, where he heard the refrain “C’s get degrees.” He saw Nebraska players who graduated in 2008 struggle to find the kind of job that might appeal to him. He knew his brother Jeff, a quarterback whose Harvard career ended in 2006 with a shoulder injury, would graduate in the spring and head to a job in the financial sector in New York. …
What Witt wanted is the vibrant academic atmosphere he has found at Yale in classes such as “Political Philosophy of Abraham Lincoln” and “Comparative Welfare Policy in Developing Countries.” He wanted a locker room where the level of humor rose above towel-snapping. Girls are a topic of conversation, but so is health care.
“People would look at me as if I had three heads if I brought that up in the locker room out there,” Witt said of the latter. “And it’s not like we’re discussing these things all the time in the Yale locker room. … You can be talking about football one minute and launch into a debate about politics the next.”
