NFL (American football) VS Rugby

[roadiemullet]

So ... with the Rugby WORLD CUP in full swing, and with England having just snatched a win against Scotland (oh yessss) I was wondering just what the Americans even thought about a good old game of Ruggers. Does anyone on here even follow the USA Rugby team? A quick check on google seems to imply that Rugby is more or less unheard of apart from being "a British version of football* without pads" and not as brutal as the NFL (pffft!).

*football being American football or 'Gridiron' of course... as what the rest of the entire globe calls football is known as "soccer" in the US, but then lets not even get started on that path LOL:D.

On the flip side, at least here in the UK, NFL is seen as a rubbish stop/start version of Rugby, sucking all the flow out of the game and giving the puny players as much protection from scratching their delicate skin as much as possible. Of course, that analysis is also wrong as the rules are completely different and its a different breed, but I only know this as Ive played a bit of NFL on my xbox and caught a slight appreciation for the game.

Wearing a helmet in case you bash your head? Where is the fun in that?

[Vanir Ausf B]

Does anyone on here even follow the USA Rugby team?

No.

Wearing a helmet in case you bash your head? Where is the fun in that?

It allows the head to be used as a battering ram. Which is a really bad idea from a player safety perspective, but that is the net effect.

[roadiemullet]

It allows the head to be used as a battering ram. Which is a really bad idea from a player safety perspective, but that is the net effect.

We do the same in Rugby , minus the helmet.... though you are allowed to wear a sweatband.

I'm interested in what Americans actually think of Rugby.... Nobody knowing or even caring about their national team in a major international sport says quite a lot. Ive heard that the NFL or some other official body is pushing to get American football into the Olympics, and there is some talk about introducing Rugby as well as (association) Football. (On a side note, an actual national British football/rugby team would be an odd thing indeed).

Anyway, if this is the case, I would assume that American football would have to become a lot more widespread around the world for it to have a real chance, but I think that as it stands that position is taken by Rugby. If Rugby became a major Olympic event, would it catch on in the US?

Again I should point out that they are both totally different games and a few cheeky jibes aside, both are quite technical as well as very physically demanding.

[Vanir Ausf B]

I haven't watched enough of Rugby to pass judgement on it, or really to even form a solid opinion.

I share your doubt about "Gridiron" football becoming an Olympic sport. Even if it did we would never see professional players in it. The chance of serious injury is too great.

As for helmets and padding, it's interesting to note that there is a lot of debate over here about whether wearing helmets makes players safer. The helmets seem to give players a somewhat false sense of security. Although I haven't watched a lot of Rugby, I have noticed that when ball carriers are tackled they are typically wrapped up and pulled to the ground. They do that in Gridiron too, but what I haven't seen in Rugby is the prevalence of "blowing up" a ball carrier by a player launching himself into the carrier at maximum velocity in an attempt to knock the ball free.

One of the strongest arguments for banning helmets comes from the Australian Football League. While it's a similarly rough game, the AFL never added any of the body armor Americans wear. When comparing AFL research studies and official NFL injury reports, AFL players appear to get hurt more often on the whole with things like shoulder injuries and tweaked knees. But when it comes to head injuries, the helmeted NFL players are about 25% more likely to sustain one.

Andrew McIntosh, a researcher at Australia's University of New South Wales who analyzed videotape, says there may be a greater prevalence of head injuries in the American game because the players hit each other with forces up to 100% greater. "If they didn't have helmets on, they wouldn't do that," he says. "They know they'd injure themselves."

Dhani Jones, a linebacker for the Cincinnati Bengals who has played rugby, too, says head injuries in that sport do happen, but they're mostly freak accidents. "In football, you're taught to hit with your face," he says. "You're always contacting with your 'hat,' which is your head."

Linky

[Affentitten]

It's an arms race, really. You need the armour because the other guy has it, which allows him to hit you harder, generating techniques that require protection...

I think the tackles in NFL are MUCH heavier and much less controlled in terms of which direction they come from and how many players involved. I'd also dispute the article above thats ays AFL is a similarly rough sport. AFL tackles are generally fairly low speed, must occur from in front only and are mainly aimed at pinning the player to the ground. The collisions that cause injury in the game are more commonly caused by bunches of players colliding when they are scrambling to grab a looose ball. I'd say rugby league had more in common with NFL, as does the ruck clear out aspect of rugby union.

[Vanir Ausf B]

Interestingly, the arms race has actually resulted in a reduction of the amount of padding worn in recent years. Players at positions that put a premium on running speed have been cutting down on the padding they wear to the bare minimum required, even at the cost of increasing the risk of injury.

With players and collisions bigger and more devastating than ever, it may seem counterintuitive to eschew anything that offers protection. But professional football players — mainly receivers and defensive backs who rely on quickness, but some linemen, too — have a finely tuned sense of their bodies and are convinced that even plastic shells less than a quarter-inch thick and a few inches wide encumber them.

The days of fully armored players — with bulky thigh and hip pads rippling beneath uniforms — are long gone, especially at the skill positions. Many leave everything except shoulder pads in the locker room, preferring the risk of injury — and in the case of Johnson, who played for Parcells with the Jets and the Cowboys, multiple team fines — over allowing an opponent to have an edge.

“You’ve got guys who wear absolutely nothing,” Joe Skiba, the Giants’ equipment director, said. “They’re nuts.”

Link

[roadiemullet]

For your viewing pleasure:

the first vids tackles are quite run of the mill to be fair. This second vid has some more recent ones:

If you guys know any NFL harsh tackle compilation vids, post em up!

[Affentitten]

I've also heard the same argument about boxing: if we returned to bare knuckles, guys wouldn't be able to hit each other so hard. But not knowing anything about the sport I can't comment on that one.

We've also seen a huge increase in the amount of protection worn by cricketers over the last 20 years. These days they look like medieval knights. But as far as I can see there hasn't been any attendant increase in bowling speed....not to the same degree. I see 8 year olds wearing full helmets and padding when all they're facing is another eight year old with a soft style ball. Not sure I approve because I think it teaches them too much fear! Gone are the days of my youth when you would play even at teenage level with one pad on the leading leg and sometimes without gloves if you'd left them at home.

[Vanir Ausf B]

Good ones!

If you guys know any NFL harsh tackle compilation vids, post em up!

Hardest Hits All Time

Not really, but there's some gems in there.

2010-11

2008-10

I have no explanation for the Eminem fetish.

[Affentitten]

Yes many of those tackles would be classed as foul in rugby, where you have to make an attempt to hold the player rather than just shoulder charging him to knock him down. (Which is pointless in the game anyway because if the player is not held he can just get up and keep going.)

[-E]

The real problem with Rugby is that there isn't enough talking. For rugby to ever become a real sport, you have to have an announcer talking about what might happen, what should happen, what will happen, and why it didn't happen and how it didn't happen and where it didn't happen and the history of it not happening. Then you have to have coaches talk to their teams about what to do, what not to do and where to do it while not doing it again. Then you have to have a smaller portion of the team talk about things from the perspective of the actual talking, I mean playing field. Then you have to have one guy on the field talk very loud to everyone else on the field, and you have to have referees talk about stuff, often while waving their hankies (handkerchiefs), and then you have to start the cycle all over again.

Without discussion, it can't be a sport as it's just chaos.

[Magpie_Oz]

Nah, we prefer to play the game than talking about playing the game

[Stalins Organ]

Head clashes do happen in rugby - Kleeburger (Can) & Woodcock (NZ) managed to KO each other last night towards the end of the game - this picture is a fraction of a second after they had a meeting of minds.

both players were out of it for a few seconds - Kleeburger was a bit more dazed afterwards as subsequent photos show - but they both walked off.

And heads get hit by knees, elbows & feet fairly regularly - but head injuries are taken seriously, the game will often stop while the player is examined.

I've watched 1 gridiron game - cleveland vs Oakland, at Oakland, 2000 - it was great - was with US friends & relations, & sat up the back among some BIG fat Oakland supporters & when they heard my "furrin'" accent they couldn't do enough for me - running comentary, explaination of the rules, beer, hot dogs...thoroughly recommend it - a great afternoon's entertainment.

Sure the footy is a bit stop/start - but if you know what's actually happening it all makes sense & it's not too hard to appreciate it.

[Affentitten]

Head clashes do happen in rugby - Kleeburger (Can) & Woodcock (NZ) managed to KO each other last night towards the end of the game .

Faingaa got knocked cold by a head vs knee in the Wallabies vs USA. One of the Samoans I think also took a nasty head and neck blow against the Boks in last ditch defence too. And I recall sitting in the stands with a sick feeling watching the Wallabies against the All Blacks in the 2003 RWC as Ben Darwin's broken neck was being braced following a scrum collision.

[Michael Emrys]

Nah, we prefer to play the game than talking about playing the game

Now where is the fun in that? Did your tribe stop evolving in some pre-verbal state or something?

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

Sure the footy is a bit stop/start - but if you know what's actually happening it all makes sense & it's not too hard to appreciate it.

The great advantage of the start-stop is that it allows each play to be closely examined in slo-mo replay and carefully analyzed. That way, you don't miss any of the action because you were looking somewhere else. It's like WEGO vs. RT. The former is clearly superior to the latter.

Michael

[Stalins Organ]

I dont' remember seeing any slo-mo replays in 200.....loots of talking about what did or didn't happen, but no replays......

And IRL there's no real shortage of tiem to do such replays in "live" broadcasts anyway for any sport.

So an imaginary advantage IMO

[Affentitten]

And heads get hit by knees, elbows & feet fairly regularly - .

In my experience usually by your own team!

[JonS]

Did your tribe stop evolving in some pre-verbal state or something?

[psst]he is Australian[/psst]

[Michael Emrys]

[psst]he is Australian[/psst]

Yeah, I know. The question was rhetorical. I figured he wouldn't understand it anyway.

Michael

[Sixxkiller]

I love rugby (All Blacks Baby) but theres really no contest. American football just has way better athletes. Rugby always talks about how sissy it is to use pads and such but it really is necessary.

But both are great games and at least rugby isnt a girls sport like soccer.

[Bigduke6]

I prefer football because it is a game that forces players of hugely different sizes and abilities to work together to execute plays, and as the plays vary so do the ways the players interact. Even the big guys: One time the offensive guard falls back to protect for the pass, another time he rolls to lead a sweep, another time he cross blocks the end, another time he just butts heads with the tackle opposite, another time he heads for the inside linebacker to cut off pursuit, and yet another time he seems to butt heads, but really he's just doing his bit to set up a screen pass.

Also, football seems to me to have more scope for more characters. Namath, Unitas, Montana, Marino, Elway, Favre, Staubach and heck even guys like Tarkington and Bradshaw and Jurgenson and Fouts and Luckman all in their way were great quarterbacks, but they all played with very different styles that put a very different stamp on the game.

Nor does the individual factor stop at the quarterbacks; it's one kind of football if you're trying to stop the run, and another kind if the runner coming at you is Gayle Sayers or Earl Cambell. Or heck, Michael Vick? Or flip to the defense, how do you run any play at all when Jack Lambert is across the line, or Jack Tatum is out there hunting your receivers? What do you do, surrender? Put a sniper in the stands?

Rugby seems to me to be more flowing but less specialized. From my perspective, what's worse is that each player seems pretty much always to have the same mission the entire game; the big guys are in the scrum, the middle-sized guys are sort of transition and important for lateraling outwards and making, and the little fast guys that would prefer not to get hit are on the wings.

To me, for my US football tasts, rugby players are too interchangable and there are too few standouts, too few guys who bring real individuality and character to the game. Maybe it's just my lack of understanding of rugby, true. But there is this: I have watched enough rugby to learly see differences in team styles between say the French or the Argies or the Kiwis. But the individual players, not so much.

So in answer to the question "How does rugby look to Americans?", I would say thatto me rugby seems a good deal like US football, except there are no fixed lines and so there are only 5 - 8 plays (i.e., tactics to get the ball forward) each side is trying to run over the whole game, when a standard US team might run 60 - 70 plays out of a playbook of several hundred. US football to me seems several orders of magnitude more complicated, and to me that complexity adds depth to the game. It is also more violent, but to me that's neither here nor there; the rules allow the violence therefore violence is part of the tool book. But raw violence alone will almost never win you a football game, and in a competative league it never will.

The delays in US football don't bother me as much as it would most Europeans, I think, because that down time is used for thinking: what down is it, where on the field is the ball, what is my team good at right at this moment, where are the opposition's weak points, and so what play needs to be run next? TV can fill this time with replays, but in the classic US football tradition fans use the time between plays to discuss what play needs to be run next, and/or why the previous play was a worse decision than the one the fans wanted.

It's very interactive, you watch the game and you're armchair quarterbacking (note the origin of the term) pretty much until one side has scored so many points they can't be caught, and that's far from every game.

Rugby to my eyes is far less controlled, less regimented, therefore far more up to the players' raw skills, and so less emphatically a coordinated effort by very different specialists than American football. It seems to me that if you are watching rugby there is less for a fan to think about, there is very little minute-by-minute second guessing of the coach and the quarterback. Rather, you are watching the flow of play and hoping your boys manage to exploit openings you see developing.

If you want to go metaphors rugby is sort of a band of mostly horn instruments improvising music as they go along, they have a general tune or theme that they're going with but due to their skill they sometimes are producing amazing jazz, and part of why it's so amazing is because it's hard to believe humans can think and react that fast as they play for an hour or more.

US football, in contrast, is a proper concert with violins and a wood section and brass and winds and percussion and the dude with the triangle, and very definately a conductor and sheets of music laying out exactly who is supposed to do what, when, and in what intensity. It is, in my opinion, a more sophisticated and complicated group task - although I would readily concede at least some of the jazz players can do things individually some concert orchestra members could not. But at the end of the day the greater and more difficult human achievement is the classical concert.

That said, I will say rugby has this huge advantage over US football: It has an international level and the fans take it seriously, rugby is not professional and widely-accepted (i.e., the market isn't there for the truly huge money), and so an international match is not just your ridiculously overpaid gladiators against their ridiculously overpaid gladiators, but our boys versus those foreign scum, how horrid it would be if we actually lost to the (fill in traditional enemy)? It makes the big rugby tests of the modern day match way US grudge matches were in the old days, like Cowboys vs. Redskins in the Landry/Allen era.

And even though I can see the athleticism in soccer, and I can appreciate the sometimes amazing skill in the game of soccer it just is not a man's sport, as rugby most certainly is.

No sport can hold my full respect where faking injuries is an accepted tactic and a shoulder-to-shoulder contact by two grown men at a full run can often as not causes one of them to fling himself on the ground. I understand very well why one can't let the striker get past or why setting up the penalty kick deep downfield is just solid tactics. I am aware that soccer players sometimes have phenomenal skils. But those positives are trumped by too many aspects of the game that reward not athleticism or skill or teamwork, but gamesmanship.

The thing I really do not understand is how the game of soccer can be popular anywhere rugby is played.

[JonS]

I prefer football

Fair enough. But this ...

because it is a game that forces players of hugely different sizes and abilities to work together to execute plays, and as the plays vary so do the ways the players interact. ... Also, football seems to me to have more scope for more characters. ...

... is opinion stated as fact, which is a fallacy, that seems to be based on ...

... my lack of understanding of rugby, ...

... this.

I could rewrite your entire post, swapping 'football' for 'rugby' and it'd make perfect sense ... to someone with that background.

I don't like football, but then I've never really watched much of it. I particularly don't like the hyper-commercialised milieu in which it seems to exist. I don't like the way rugby is drifting faster and faster in that direction.

On the other hand, I can well imagine that a pick-up game on some empty field or the beach would be just as much fun as a pick-up game of soccer, cricket, volleyball, or rugby.

[Stalins Organ]

Gridiron certainly has better athletes - but IMO that's just down to specialisation and money.

When you are fielding 2 completely different teams, with a game that requires many of the players to efectively do jsut one thing, and you pour hundreds of millions of $$'s into it annually you will get that.

Rugby does have specialisations - think of the tight 5 in the forwards - but they still have to run, pass, tackle, and occasionally some of them even entertain us with an atempted kick!!

Interestingly IIRC the hooker for the US team at RWC used to be a quarterback!

IIRC the IRB (international rugby board) will make a few hundred million $$'s (3-400??) from the world cup - which is almost all its income for the next 4 years??

the New Zealand union has an annual budget of about $60 million I think - maybe less - this article puts the 5 year income from SANZAR broadcast rights at $120m US

How does that compare with the budget of an average american football franchise??

[Affentitten]

Rugby does have specialisations - think of the tight 5 in the forwards - but they still have to run, pass, tackle, and occasionally some of them even entertain us with an atempted kick!!

Interestingly IIRC the hooker for the US team at RWC used to be a quarterback!

I think the hookers these days are required to do a lot more than 20 years ago in terms of play making and standing in the back line for plays. Though it's more entertaining watching a second rower trying to pass or receive a ball at full pace!