AHC: Rugy the Dominant Sport in the United States

So; I've gotten into Rugby recently. Well; not recently, I should say. Back in 2003, I did a semester abroad to Ireland, which coincided with Ireland making it to the final game of 6 Nations Tourneyment. I came to really enjoy the game, although I have always had some trouble finding any games to watch.

Flash forward a few years, and I finally got an Xbox Rugby game, and have enjoyed a great night playing it with friends (althogh we've had no idea what we were doing most of the time.)

So, with the inspiration now behind us, let me pose the AHC. How can we make it so that Rugby Football, in either of its variations, become the dominant sport in the United States. Extra points in Football still exists and is a well respected sport.
 
Technically, American Football is just a local variant of rugby with a handful of rules changes. The original rules written back in the 1880s were basically just the rules of Rugby with a few cosmetic changes. I believe the first year they used "the handling game" as the basis for intercollegiate competition, they literally used the then current laws of rugby and just rewrote the confusing scoring system into something even more confusing*.

As a more realistic answer to your question, I can think of three ways to do it:

  1. Have Walter Camp not invent the snap and the line of scrimmage and have the game muddle through until laws changes a few years down the road clean up the scrum.
  2. In the late 1890s/early 1900s a few schools on the West Coast switched from gridiron to rugby for a few years. If they decided to keep playing it, at some point the sport might expand East. Though it would be hard to overcome gridiron when it does.
  3. Teddy Roosevelt's threats to reform the game from above don't lead to the forward pass but instead lead to returning to rugby rules in 1906.
Or, for a really implausible idea, let the Australians bring rugby.

  • An Australian rugby team (I don't remember which version though) was scheduled to go to England right around the start of WWI. They planned on going through the States and playing local teams. The swing through America was canceled and never attempted again.
  • The Australians played a State of Origin match in the States around 1987ish. Nothing came of it, but if for some reason Hal the Alien Space Bat decided to go to that game, who knows what may have happened.


*--At that time, I believe the winner of a rugby match was the team that scored the most goals (by drop kick, conversion kick, penalty kick, or kick from the mark) with the number of tries scored serving as a tiebreaker if goals were equal. That same year in American football, a team won by scoring the most touchdowns, with various goals counting as different numbers of touchdowns. The confusion evaporates if you think of "touchdown" as "point" and don't overthink the point values.
 
Well for starters the rest of the world respects America for playing a manly game rather than dressing up in ten tons of armour* and a few more paraplegic Americans due to collapsed scrums.


*I am aware that gridiron is just as manly as rugby and that the armour really is necessary precisely because it's an even more physical game with many more head on impacts. But the stereotype is there.
 
Well for starters the rest of the world respects America for playing a manly game rather than dressing up in ten tons of armour* and a few more paraplegic Americans due to collapsed scrums.


*I am aware that gridiron is just as manly as rugby and that the armour really is necessary precisely because it's an even more physical game with many more head on impacts. But the stereotype is there.

But would idiots be tackling with the head if they didn't have helmets? Would there be as many injuries if people weren't wearing hard body armor that seems to be more a weapon than for protection?

I honestly believe that American football would be safer if they banned padding.
 
Well for starters the rest of the world respects America for playing a manly game rather than dressing up in ten tons of armour* and a few more paraplegic Americans due to collapsed scrums.


*I am aware that gridiron is just as manly as rugby and that the armour really is necessary precisely because it's an even more physical game with many more head on impacts. But the stereotype is there.

The padding and helmets in American football have changed the game away from the other 'handling' games such as Rugby (either code) and Aussie rules , as even though rugby players do wear some padding nowadays and various forms of scrum cap and come and gone .. the padding, armour and Helmets in American football leads to a quest for bigger, heavier and faster guys to run into each other and stop progress, rather than technical play to maintain or prevent the ball's motion towards the scoring line ...

American football has it's share of tetraplegics e.g. Marc Buonoconti of Miami Project fame ... the predominant SCI modality in both rugby and gridron is cervical spine injuries rather than thoraco-lumbar.
 
Is football the dominant sport in the US? Not baseball, basketball or NASCAR?

It should be. Sometimes I think baseball wins out just because it has so many more games played than the standard 16-game seasons of the NFL.
 
But would idiots be tackling with the head if they didn't have helmets? Would there be as many injuries if people weren't wearing hard body armor that seems to be more a weapon than for protection?

I honestly believe that American football would be safer if they banned padding.

Okay, first things first, American Football predates the codification of Rugby, by 2 years, with Rutgers playing Princeton in 1869, although the rules were far more similar to soccer at that point. Rugby style football, as it is known, although it has no connection to actual Rugby, gained prominence in 1871, the year that the Union was formed, when Harvard played McGill, using Harvard house rules. Also, before the introduction of padding, as helmets were only really encouraged until the 1950's when the hits got harder and faster, there were to many deaths going on in football players

Now as to how you can get Rugby to be the most popular sport, well, the easiest way to do so, would be the simple naming of football as rugby, with it being called American Rugby abroad. If you want it to extend to America, don't have the North split off into League. A more unified Union would have a better chance of spreading the game to the US. And still, Americans don't take kindly to introduced sports.
 
It should be. Sometimes I think baseball wins out just because it has so many more games played than the standard 16-game seasons of the NFL.

The NFL wins by most standards, especially revenue where they blow the other sports out of the water. Baseball does have a million games so if you're counting raw number of spectators per year they've got a massive total compared to the NFL. But of course that means the NFL's going to sell virtually every seat at every game and their per-game attendance is double that of MLB.
 
The NFL wins by most standards, especially revenue where they blow the other sports out of the water. Baseball does have a million games so if you're counting raw number of spectators per year they've got a massive total compared to the NFL. But of course that means the NFL's going to sell virtually every seat at every game and their per-game attendance is double that of MLB.

The NFL is really irrelevant in this discussion, since it was in the context of intercollegiate football that the game was codified and became a nationwide pastime. Professional football (American) only began to equal the college game in the late 1960's, mainly because the league spread into the west and south.

If the American college and professional game retained the "manly" elements of rugby (no pads and helmets, no separate offensive and defensive squads, fewer time outs, limited substitutions, and fewer formal stoppages of play) then it could have accomodated the introduction of the forward pass, place kicks, scrimmage lines, and down/distance to become a very interesting variant of rugby. It has to be noted, however, that American football did not fully eclipse baseball as the nation's most popular sport until it crystalized as the highly regimented and specialized game between teams of armored physical freaks it is today - both at the collegeaite and professional level. I think this reflects something in the American psyche that a modified form of rugby or "soccer" would never appease.
 
Okay, first things first, American Football predates the codification of Rugby, by 2 years, with Rutgers playing Princeton in 1869, although the rules were far more similar to soccer at that point. Rugby style football, as it is known, although it has no connection to actual Rugby, gained prominence in 1871.

That is just wrong.

The football that American colleges played before McGill played Harvard was a completely different sport and everyone knew it. Some schools allowed handling and some did not, but the consensus became playing by Rugby rules. The 1876 rules of what would become American Football WERE the rules of Rugby.

Of course a few years later, they changed the rules by replacing scrums with snaps and lines of scrimmages. That was the real break from Rugby to American Football.

There is a great little book called "The Anatomy of a Game: Football, the Rules, and the Men Who Made the Game" by David M. Nelson which chronicles the very slow evolution of football. I believe much of it can be found for free via Google Books. While the transition from rugby takes only a few paragraphs, the book does contain the entire 1875 (if I have the right year) law code of the Rugby Union.
 
That is just wrong.

The football that American colleges played before McGill played Harvard was a completely different sport and everyone knew it. Some schools allowed handling and some did not, but the consensus became playing by Rugby rules. The 1876 rules of what would become American Football WERE the rules of Rugby.

Of course a few years later, they changed the rules by replacing scrums with snaps and lines of scrimmages. That was the real break from Rugby to American Football.

There is a great little book called "The Anatomy of a Game: Football, the Rules, and the Men Who Made the Game" by David M. Nelson which chronicles the very slow evolution of football. I believe much of it can be found for free via Google Books. While the transition from rugby takes only a few paragraphs, the book does contain the entire 1875 (if I have the right year) law code of the Rugby Union.

I may have to check that book out. I've gotten more interested in the history of gridiron and football. Hmmm.
 
Top