MADDEN!!

[Ironwood]

You haven't been paying attention.  I'm actually a closet American Football fan.

I just don't tend to talk about it much for two reasons :

1 - I know fuckall detail.  I just like watching the games and have my own team preferences.  (Packers, Sorry).
2 - There's a part of my brain that still rebels about you guys calling it football.  In my mind, the game of football should be played with, er, a ball using, um, feet.  Real football indeed(!)

Can I direct you here - back in the mid 90's I ended up getting very, very drunk with the entire cheerleading squad.  It was fucking awesome.  I'd like to clarify that this was before I met my wife.


Further, as I've also explained in the past, I know nothing and care even less about Soccer.  I am, in no way, a representative Scottish bloke, with the exception of my temper and alcohol stance.  (which is like Defensive Stance.)



Edited to Add :  The reason that AF tanks so badly over here was summed up rather nicely by Giles in Buffy : "I just think it's rather odd that a nation that prides itself on its virility should feel compelled to strap on forty pounds of protective gear just in order to play rugby. "
 

[Big Gulp]

Edited to Add :  The reason that AF tanks so badly over here was summed up rather nicely by Giles in Buffy : "I just think it's rather odd that a nation that prides itself on its virility should feel compelled to strap on forty pounds of protective gear just in order to play rugby. "
 

Sort of different, though.  Rugby tackling is less pure collision and more wrapping up the other guy.  Also your average rugby player isn't a 300 pound land monster...

As to why it's called football, well in the 19th century it was a lot more like rugby.  There was no protection to speak of (even leather helmets didn't get added until the early 1900's) and there was no such thing as the forward pass.  There was kicking and running, and that was really it (hence the name "football").  The timing of the game was also much, much different.  There were no quarters, there wasn't much in the way of rigidly defined field position (the first down also wouldn't come around until later).  What you're seeing now is the end result of people constantly tinkering with a sport for over 100 years until it's completely evolved beyond what it originally was.

[Daeven]

2 - There's a part of my brain that still rebels about you guys calling it football.  In my mind, the game of football should be played with, er, a ball using, um, feet.  Real football indeed(!)

Sorry, but we've been playing organized football in colleges over here since the 1870's ish. Prior art and all that. Come up with a different name for your new fangled sport. I hear Soccer works.

;)

As to the pads... I've played rugby and football. The tackling is completely different - like Big Gulp said. We wear the body armor because it's nice to play more than once a year. Trust me. Run a slant some time as a Tight End and get hammered by a MLB after catching the ball. Trust me, you just don't get hit like that in Rugby.

[HaemishM]

2 - There's a part of my brain that still rebels about you guys calling it football.  In my mind, the game of football should be played with, er, a ball using, um, feet.  Real football indeed(!)

Sorry, but we've been playing organized football in colleges over here since the 1870's ish. Prior art and all that. Come up with a different name for your new fangled sport. I hear Soccer works.

From Wikipedia:

Whilst football continued to be played in various forms throughout Britain, the English public schools (fee paying schools) are widely credited with certain key achievements in the creation of modern football (association and rugby football). The evidence suggests that during the sixteenth century English public schools generally and headmaster Richard Mulcaster in particular were instrumental in taking football away from its violent "mob" form and turning it into an organised team sport that was beneficial to schoolboys. Therefore, the game became institutionalised, regulated, and part of a larger more central tradition. Many early descriptions of football and references to it (e.g. poetry) were recorded by people who had studied at these schools, showing they were familiar with the game. Finally, in the nineteenth century, teachers and former students were the first to write down formal rules of early modern football to enable matches to be played between schools. Though the Harry Potter series is based on fantasy, its favorite sport Quidditch can be seen as closely mirroring the important and vital role which football plays in the English public school system.

The rules of football as they are codified today are effectively based on the mid-19th century efforts to standardise the widely varying forms of football played at the public schools of England. The first ever set of football rules were written at Eton College in 1815. The Cambridge Rules were a code of football rules, first drawn up at Cambridge University in 1848, which have influenced the development of Association football (also known simply as "football", or soccer) and subsequent codes.

I think English (or association) football beats American Football by about 55 years.

[sigil]

As to the pads... I've played rugby and football. The tackling is completely different - like Big Gulp said. We wear the body armor because it's nice to play more than once a year. Trust me. Run a slant some time as a Tight End and get hammered by a MLB after catching the ball. Trust me, you just don't get hit like that in Rugby.

They would if they had the 40 pound of padding.

They still sometimes do without it.

[Daeven]

I think English (or association) football beats American Football by about 55 years.

Goddamn Tory.

Don't confuse me with facts and other trivialities damnit!

[HaemishM]

There's naught wrong wif likin' bof kinds o' footer.

[Endie]

I've played (and play) both rugby and (American) football, and these competitive comparison threads are stupid, and usually fed by fat blokes who've never been paid to play either (although my american football was purely amateur: I wouldn't want to be ruled out if they make it an Olympic sport after all).

Rugby requires a broader range of skills and fitness types, since only in the set pieces is there still true differentiation: backs need the upper body strength to maul, forwards need sprinting speed etc.  But I think, punting and kicking aside, that you'd be lucky to find half a dozen rugby players in the world who could consistently beat a first-choice NFL player at their specific skill set, especially speed and acceleration over the ten to forty metre range.  Good rugby players are generalists in skills and fitness tailored to lung-bursting 2-minute-long plays, while American footballers are specialists tailored to short bursts of unbelievably intense, explosive power.  You can't compare them directly.

Of course, the bit that usually gets the insults flying is the vast chasm in drug-testing between the codes (especially the difference between the regimen for in- and out-of-season testing in the NFL. Rugby players will never match the combination of acceleration and mass of the truly big men in the NFL, for instance, because they'd get banned for using the substances required to build that sort of power.

As regards the hits, what i would say is, if you really want to hurt somebody on purpose, and you don't mind getting sent off, football - as in soccer - is the game to do it in.  Things like spiking and collapsed scrums can happen in football or rugby, but it's very hard to intentionally break someone's neck: you have to get very unlucky.  If you really want to break someone's leg in soccer, then we could get bored listing the examples (Alf Inge Halland, Ian Ferguson etc).  Anyone can do it.

Oh, and the padding in American football does make a huge difference in the really big hits, so long as you know how to make and take contact.  Most people will never feel anything like a full-speed meeting engagement, unpadded, with a 19-stone number 8 who really knows how to tackle.  But I grant you that a rugby player will never get a helmet in the kidneys while he is in mid-air.

Daeven, btw, you're both wrong and right about the impacts.  Some rules and techniques in American football are dictated by the padding, while some padding is dictated by the rules.  But when you say "trust me, you just don't get hit like that in Rugby" you're, um, wrong.  The difference is that, without the paddnig, you are (as you say) more likely to be out for a few weeks, and to find yourself in casualty.  And rugby is, in many ways, the softer brother of Aussie rules when it comes to the hits.