League is 10x quicker than rugby union thats why our players become stars in your game

1) Part of the reason NFL players look so scary and monstrous compared to rugby players is because you're used to seeing NFL players in pads, which makes them look a lot bigger. If you saw rugby and NFL players next to each other without pads on, they would look more similar.

2) In rugby, there are two 40-minute halves and no re-substitution (once a player goes out, they can't go back in). Obviously this means that there is a much higher premium on endurance in rugby, so explosiveness is not as important. If NFL players had to run for 40 minutes straight, they would not be as large or explosive because they would have to train more for endurance. There's a reason why the top marathon runners are twigs and the top sprinters are muscular.

Quick Question.

Example. Ronan O'Gara is Irelands goal kicker and is nearing the end of his career. Will likely be done playing in 3-4 years. How long do you think it would take him to master the art of kicking FGs in the NFL?

And the people who know nothing about rugby are terribad about overemphasizing the important of "athleticism" (seems to be defined as strength and explosiveness), which is not as important in rugby.

GoldenBears, I know you play rugby at one of the top US college programs and have probably seen your fair share of former football players come in and do very well. But the top US college rugby players are extremely weak technically compared to 18-22 year-olds in New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. Most US players didn't start playing until high school or college. So of course it's going to be much easier for a football player to come in and be one of the better players on a US rugby team.

Have you ever played with or against a good international club team (I'm not being sarcastic, just wondering what your impressions were)?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CU7-GWSWbs

Sick shot i could watch this all day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66wK9...eature=related

****ing bang. Awesome how they just brawl

More like speed and agility. Since every American sport where these traits are major factors is dominated by blacks, it seems difficult to believe that the mostly white teams that are considered the best in international rugby could really be on par athletically with the players in the NFL. It's ~200 times tougher for a white person to make the NFL as a WR, CB, or RB than it is for a black person to make it, and even at positions where whites have a decent shot like safety or linebacker, the black athletes still have a very clear advantage.

Yeah. So many elite black QBs.

people of west-African origin aren't intrinsically better athletes than people of European origin; it's just that they tend to have a more balanced distribution of abilities across the spectrum (at both ends) whereas Europeans predominantly occupy the middle ground, due to a more limited genetic variation. or at least that's what i have read.

Cliffnotes of thread plz?

People ignore sport specific specialization. Hilarity ensues.

You're completely missing the point. Rugby requires a different type of athleticism than American football because it requires so much more endurance. But even if NFL players do have superior athleticism for rugby, that doesn't guarantee that they would be able to develop the rugby specific skills and instincts necessary to beat an international all-star team.

Look at MMA. Why hasn't it all of a sudden become dominated by explosive black guys? Certainly many black fighters have had great success (A. Silva, Rashad, etc.), but that success has more to do with their years of training than their superior athleticism. Guys like Melvin Guillard and Anthony Johnson were able to get to a certain point with raw athleticism, but they were eventually beaten by guys with superior skill.

Of course professional rugby players would be better at rugby....

However, an argument against rugby as a sport is that the defending World Champions are represented by a small subset of the country's population. South Africa's population is only about 9% white, yet their rugby team is comprised overwhelmingly by whites. Rugby appears similar to skiing and golf in that its best participants come from a relatively small population that had access to the sport growing up. It doesn't mean that rugby isn't a worthy sport or that its athletes aren't really good at what they do, just that it's not quite as impressive as watching the World Cup or the 100m finals at the Olympics, knowing that you are watching the top athletes from their respective countries.

White people are fine at things like throwing a ball to a receiver or throwing it through a basket. That's why I specifically pointed out that it's "speed and agility" where blacks tend to excel. If rugby's really mainly about making accurate passes on pitches then I guess I misjudged it in the 10 or so hours total that I've spent watching it lifetime, but it seems to me that the skills that are useful for RBs, LBs, DBs, or at the very least QBs on pure option teams with very little passing would cross-over to rugby much moreso than those of a pocket passer.

A few years ago a couple of rich guys actually tried this. They recruited about twnety undrafted college player; flew them to Australia; gave them access to expert coaching/facilities; let them train alongside professionals and... it was complete flop.

Even in League, the nuances of the game are impossible to teach in a year.

Hell, could you image trying to a college player from to SEC agreeing to power bind!?

Yeah... Look at all the blacks in the World Cup Final. Pure white man shooting/throwing ldo.

Stop with this jackass racist argument.

What's the average kickoff distance in the NFL though (and that's unangled)

Sounds more like Steve Slaton imo

No, just no.

You also underestimate the player pool rugby players are drawn from. NFL is what mostly US and some random guys from other countries that have some ties to the US in some way (family there, college etc)
England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales etc+NZ+Australia+South Africa is also quite a few people imo

the rugby teams wins easily, I wouldnt expect them to win 80-3 or something sick but they should win confortably, 42-11 or something like that.

I would expect the NLF team to be preety tough on defence but I think they would struggle a lot with the ball, I would expect like at least 7 penalties scored for the rugby team plus a couple of tries due to mistakes ( not because the rugby team grinded a try).
I can see the NFL team scoring a try.

Prediction:
Rugby 38 ( 8 pens+ 2 tries) NFL 8 ( they missed the conversion because they suck at kicking, lol)

I dont see stamina being an issue because you can choose players from a very large pool and they have one year to train, the problem to me is they wont know what the **** to do with the ball.

Rugby is way too techincal for 1 year to be enough to come close to any of the top teams. Any decent team would just exploit the NFL players' lack of kicking ability, their inexperience in rucks, lineouts, scrums and mauls and the fact that they would give away a penalty at pretty much every break down.

The NFL players would get in plenty of decent hits but that just isn't enough to win a game of rugby. A decent amount of the training time would need to be spent getting them up to the fitness levels required to last 80 minutes which would of course reduce their explosiveness over the first few yards.

Rugby players switching to American football would be just as unsuccessful. The 2 sports are too different to switch and expect to become world class that late on in life.

It'd be pretty routine. All the best can kick a rugby ball (which doesn't travel as far as a football) 50-60 metres. I can't understand why noones done it yet.

You are joking right? Its the other way round in the southern hemisphere. Generally league players switching to union are a joke. Union players who have switched to league however generally become stars in the game.

Northern hemisphere rugby union isn't really comparable to southern hemisphere rugby union.

He's wrong wrt northern hemisphere as well though. Jason Robinson was the pnly real success and thats because he was other world good.

Rugby is not that hard to learn, you guys. Has anybody in this thread actually played both rugby and football?

You guys are underestimating how large the NFL player pool is. Sure any one specific player might try and flop, but they have SO many guys that they could definitely field a team of 20 or so freak athletes who have played Rugby growing up, and another 20 or so ridiculous freaks that could pick up the game pretty quickly.

The NFL would dominate on the wings, centers and probably in the front row too. If you could find a few passable ballhandlers in all of the NFL, they would probably win... and so imo this thread has more to do with a grand hypthetical and more to do with whether or not any of those guys in the league actually played 9 or 10 growing up and could do so passably with a year to get back into it.

FWIW the team that I play with actually has a converted NFL player on it, and he's very solid and one the best players. Not as good as the ex-Eagles forwards that we have, but then again he was a lower level NFL guy and not some ridiculous stud as well.