Living overseas I became a huge fan of rugby. Having a legitimate rugby league that played in the spring or summer would be an excellent way to bridge the non-football gaps of the year. However, there would be no name recognition from college and no guaranteed fans for popular college players.
In the past, I have also worried about football-trained players transitioning to rugby. Helmeted versus non-helmeted tackling styles are very different. However, in the modern era of changing tackling methods to reduce head trauma, the difference might be less and the transition might be easier. The rugby kicking game would suffer at the hands of Americans that were not trained in it.
Indeed! Rugby is a great sport, but we Yankees have no idea how to play it. I played a season at NU, ripped up my shoulder, and then returned to playing a few years later when I lived in Budapest (I was "Hungary Jack" on another board). I soon learned that the guys I played with in Hungary--expats from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia--were so much more steeped in the game than this oafish, bumbling, football-inebriated American lout. I tried to compensate for my lack of understanding of game strategy and tactics by working my tail off, but that's not the essence of the sport.
When I describe rugby today, I say "imagine soccer, but you get to use your hands, and you cannot pass forward." Rugby is a game of field position and ball possession, with teams often trading one for another. Rugby "plays" are designed to create mismatches of numbers between offense and defense. Most of this occurs on the edges. where speed and agility matter. But every so often, the pack--the big guys whose job it is to push and shove and get the ball (that was job description)-can mount a run down the field with bursts of powerful effort, short passes, and ball movement. This can look like a stampede of wildebeests to the uninitiated, or to whomever poor louts are trying to stop it.
But Americans have the athleticism to excel in rugby if we had a development program that started early. It's just not popular enough. We are a better fit for rugby 7s, where sheer athleticism matters much more.
I am fairly convinced that rugby is much, much safer than football. Is rugby safer? Or course not, but in rugby tackling is generally less a game of "smear the queer" and wiping out the play and more an act of slowing down the opposition and trying to control the ball. And with rugby, the absence of blocking greatly reduces the number of individual collisions that occur on each play. The absence of protective, hard shelled equipment is a big advantage too.
Rugby is a higher form of football.
