Will rugby really ever take off in the USA?

Will rugby really ever take off in the USA?

I'm hearing that CTE from the NFL and the Rio games are helping the sport tremendously. Soccer moms will let their kids play rugby with a lot less fear than handegg

omg i would love that

>team sport
>in the olympics
>girls can play it
>title IX
>cheap to fund
>can be played on existing stadiums
>not competing with other sports in terms of body types (tall girls can pick from basketball and volleyball)
>the men's team can recruit from football players

sevens has a good shot at making it

No

Depends on what you mean by "take off".

Can it become more popular, improving NCAA rugby and the US national team? Basically be "the next soccer" and carve out a nice niche for itself? Of course.

Can it became a major sport and replace football?
Highly doubtful, at least in all of our lifetimes.

>Soccer moms will let their kids play rugby with a lot less fear than handegg
kek

don't even need to say it

It'll take off until the All Blacks absolutely blow them the fuck out again like what happened in the early 20th century

Sevens will do well enough but USA will never be a strong rugby nation

Kids will just play other popular sports over handegg if it comes down to it. They'd even play povertyball over rugby.

>those unshapely legs
She really let herself go. She should be doing more cycling and yoga.

The All Blacks would get ground down to irrelevance if rugby became even somewhat popular here.

>tfw this is truth but can't accept it

You fucks stay away from rugby and we'll stay away from basketball

Dude everyone on the west coast used to play rugby. America won two gold medals at the olympics (which only france and romania attended) for rugby. They thought they were the best in the world.

And then they got absolutely blown the fuck by the All Blacks. They were so demoralized they gave up the sport for grid iron

Both sports can help each other. NFL and Rugby.

The guy in the OP his name is Nate Ebner. He played rugby all his life until his junior year of Ohio State, then switched to Football. That's only 2 years of hand egg! The patriots and coach Bill drafted him in the 6th round and he now has a ring.

Rugby could help save the NFL from soccer moms. And in return it gets to grow here and send some NFL players to go get us a medal in Olympics

>Rugby could help save the NFL from soccer moms

I don't know m8. I don't think its the sport that's making all those NFL players beat the shit out of their families and their dogs

Mommys are scared shitless because of the liberal media and Will Smith concussion movies

Those same mums wouldn't let their kid play any contact sport. And guys have lost their literal left nut in games before, divegrass isn't going anywhere anytime soon in America so I don't think rugby is invading you guys just yet.

Dunno about rugby, but things were taking off with ur mum last night, son.

Divegrass might have a chance because there are American billionaires involved. With rugby , the numbers are very favorable if you dislike concussions.

It's so so so much lower than Handegg that you can market it as a safety first sport. Super safe , advance tackles , no head butting or head hunting

While I agree that Rugby is the superior sport and is highly advanced than handegg, my point is that these same people won't tolerate it either. They're out to be rid of any sport or activity that requires hurting someone.

American females might become the best in the world at sevens (like soccer). The men will barely be competitive (like soccer).

Title IX has alot to do with it. Some college sports teams for females have annual budgets that exceed medal winning national teams, even in Europe. If rugby sevens becomes an easy way to satisfy Title IX requirements, it will take off in terms of funding and participation, but only for females.

The impact is less in rugby, but you get hurt more. I've played both, and in rugby people have punched me, bit me and nearly ripped my bollocks off
Never happened in football at all.

never understood why did americans created the nfl. It's basically just a far easier version of rugby.

I hope so, also hope it will become more popular around the world (in countries where it isnt yet).
They need to keep teammurica from fucking it up with too much down time filled with commercials etc.

The USA literally invented their own meme sports in the nineteenth century to escape British influence

Would be nice to have a country that can actually compete with us from the northern hemisphere

This isn't true at all. The concern about the NFL is the chance that you can get a debilitating brain disease like in Boxing. Many parents got their kids into football because Boxing was too dangerous, as opposed to not letting their kids play sports at all. The same is happening with football now.

Parents in America love their kids playing sports. They just don't want their kids.....ya know, getting dementia and committing suicide at age 45.

If Americans made rugby a major sport, Australia and New Zealand would lose the one thing they could say they're good at.

>The concern about the NFL is the chance that you can get a debilitating brain disease like in Boxing
The problem isn't as prominent as it is in the NFL but it does exist in rugby. Head injury is probably the most prominent single risk in professional rugby today

The all blacks have the best win rate of any professional team in any sport. 90% over decades. There are teams that make the semifinals of the rugby world cup that have literally never won against the all blacks

Yanks bandwagoning rugby all of a sudden wont change that

if you saw the freaks who came out of NFL you would think twice
still put all my money on the ABs though

NFL players can be freaks because the way the game is played. Only twenty minutes of actual gametime spread out over three hours and with team sizes of fifty with plenty of substitutions.

If any of them tried to do eighty minutes of continuous play their steroid abused hearts would explode

I do think there is a concern for concussions in rugby but the biggest thing is the fact that in football you get incremental hits to the head so often that after a period of years it more than likely leads to CTE.

Think of it this way:
In American football, every play is like a more organized ruck in rugby. Except the lineman (forwards in rugby) are much bigger and stronger because they never need and often times aren't allowed to handle the ball, like forwards are. They only need to focus on the line of scrimmage (ruck). Helmets allow for much more head on head collisions than are even possible in a non-padded sport like rugby. If rugby forwards butted heads as much as lineman do they be knocked out by the end of the game.

But in football they notice it much less due to the helmets, and some scientists have said that football players, with lineman being the most susceptible, can get upwards of 800-1000 of these small non-noticable hits to the head every season. These small hits add up, and over a decade or more or even less of playing the sport, consistently getting these small hits almost inevitably leads to CTE.

It's like getting stress fractures in your brain. If you keep trying to play on it, eventually it's going to break altogether. I started watching Rugby on and off a couple years ago, but have never played it. Though from what I can see, while it's dangerous you're never going to have the consistency of small hits to the head like in football, though the risk of a big hit leading to a concussion seems about the same in both sports.

>In American football, every play is like a more organized ruck in rugby. Except the lineman (forwards in rugby) are much bigger and stronger because they never need and often times aren't allowed to handle the ball, like forwards are. They only need to focus on the line of scrimmage (ruck)
I played nose tackle for a year at uni, I get that. The thing is that rugby isn't safe enough that it would satisfy the mumsnet crowd in America

surprisingly reasonable, did not expect this here.
for etiquette reasons: your'e still a faggot

why do they teach nfl players to lead with the head then?

the tackling fundamentals in it seem awful. especially when you see a guy run through a whole team because all the defenders are trying to knock him off his feet and bouncing off rather than just wrap him up and put him down

LOL. People are calling guys like Carlin Isles and Perry Baker some of the fastest rugby players in the world, and neither of them were even good enough to make it in the NFL. Nate Ebner is the only current NFL player on the Olympic 7s team and he's a bench player. If we convinced even half of our best NFL Runningbacks, Receivers, Linebackers, and Punters to play Rugby we'd be the best team in the world easily.

I was talking to a Welsh guy and according to him the reason soccer is a bigger sport in england than rugby or cricket is because working class englanders are too terrified of being injured to play them.

Like all of them think if they play cricket a stray ball will scone them in the head and kill them or if they play rugby they'll break their neck or their spine and everyone knows a guy who knows a guy which it happened to

CTE is only going to hurt the NFL if they keep trying to make it safer with all kinds of asinine rule changes. If they keep trying to legislate safety it brings the quality of the game down.

It's not a safe game. You'd have to change it completely.

By now people know what they're getting into. Risk and reward.

while thats true in theory the game requires different skills

Everyone I know who played rugby got a broken clavicle. =/

To be good at rugby you need to be good all around.

Running fast or being big doesn't mean shit if you can't tackle and pass and run non stop for eighty minutes without gassing

Tackling is barely done in practices. It's in the collective bargaining agreement to prevent extra injury or some shit.

So you get idiots launching themselves without wrapping up because they don't keep the basics honed.

Seriously?
Fuck no

its 7s rugby its a tournament/ fun/ easy entertainment version of rugby union. the 15s game is way more tactical, is way more demanding in strength, technique and toughness (esp. for forwards). The amount of violence and strategic aspects of the two games are not comparable.

7s is simply made for events

Do they not know how to tackle properly?

>People are calling guys like Carlin Isles and Perry Baker some of the fastest rugby players in the world, and neither of them were even good enough to make it in the NFL.
Neither are good enough to play actual rugby either. They're fast but totally useless players who are only any good in 7s.

yep that shit happens, especially when you haven't enough muscle in that area

7s is the only one close enough to being worth watching

>working class englanders are too terrified of being injured to play them
Not really, it's just that both cricket and rugby are middle/upper class sports in the UK and working class people hardly get much of an opportunity to play them, whereas a lot of workplaces have soccer teams
Injury actually stops more middle class people from playing because they don't want to turn up for work in a formal environment covered in cuts and bruises

For you.

For most Americans
Rugby is like a sport based off of the most boring offense in our football

>turn up for work in a formal environment covered in cuts and bruises
Something tells me the average middle class office worker would take pride in that.

Sevens is too close to the sports days and tournament weeks I did as a kid for me to take seriously

I'm sure some do but I know plenty people who have stopped playing because that sort of thing makes them look unprofessional

Rugby is too close to the triple option for me to take seriously

For an American attention span this is true.

like i said
>easy entertainment

nothing wrong with that. watching a game is always more fun when you fully understand it. in the 15´s game there are many ref decisions around rucks for example most of expert viewers couldn´t see.

also 7´s the weaker team always has a pretty good chance of a few lucky punches also you dont have to watch 50 minutes of an already won / lost game

To be honest the thing that stopped me liking football when I played was that you're told exactly what to do all the time. I liked the tactical aspect but being a cog in a machine is boring as fuck, especially as a nose because I had literally 3 possible jobs

I'm not sure Brits play only one position in pickup football but you could play our 7s version with just passing

Nah, it requires running for more than 10m without a break, burgers would be shit at it so it could never take off