This is just an idle hypothetical that I was wondering about, so accept the hypothetical and run with it whatever way you want.
Say that American football is banned tomorrow, with immediate effect. With thousands of American footballers now idle, how long would it take for America to win the Rugby world cup?
A very, very long time.
Most of the kids playing American football would gravitate to baseball and basketball and soccer.
Many wide receivers would probably start running track, many offensive linemen would start wrestling. A few tough guys might go to mixed martial arts/ultimate fighting.
Rugby just isn’t on the radar for most American kids. Lacrosse seems to be a growing sport, and that’s the second/third-tier sport most likely to boom if football players had to find another game.
They would be better off going for the Rugby League World Cup which they would win pretty smartly with a decent Aussie coach.
League or Union?
I would say it’s like cricket and baseball, the games are superficially similar, but skills which are essential or an advantage in one sport are not so in another. What’s the use of being a great quarter back, when there is no forward throw in Rugby. Being able to tackle hard? Sure, what’s the use, the guy gets knocked down and play continues.
I was thinking Rugby union, as the world cup is next year.
I get that Baseball and Basketball would draw players away, but still you would have a lot of very big, very fast guys whose skillsets seem a lot more suited to Rugby than to those other sports. They might not immediately start playing rugby, but would it be such a surprise if over the next 5/10 years Rugby started getting vastly more popular to fill the void of hard hitting egg-chasing left by the absence of the NFL?
The biggest issue is that Rugby is a continuous sport, with everyone on the field for the full eighty minutes. American Football players are trained for short bursts and spend half the game off the field. It isn’t that they don’t have the fitness, it is just that they are better at something else. A bit like 100m sprinters versus 10,000m runners.
And that’s without getting in to the ins and outs of the actual sport.
I’d personally be shocked.
Yes, there’s rugby in the US, but so is soccer and cricket (to a very small degree) and other sports.
The sport is simply different from American football. As noted above, the skillsets are superficially similar in the same way sprinters are superficially similar to distance runners.
The thing that maybe is getting ignored is that a lot of American football fans have been watching since birth, have played it (or a version of it like 2 hand touch or flag) since youth, and have parents, grandparents, and great grandparents who have watched the game and follow particular professional teams as families for generations. And that’s ignoring college football, which features fan insanity at the same level or greater. Replacing that level of enthusiasm is the work of at least a generation, if ever. And I’d be shocked if it were even that fast, even with tons of promotion and funding.
ETA: If any sport, I’d say baseball. Baseball’s been on a bit of a downswing among fans for a while, with ratings down over the last few decades. It may enjoy a resurgence should football go away. It wouldn’t be the same athletes but there are tons of athletes across the country who could fill that void.
Does this include Canadian and Aussie rules football? If not, Canada should expect a flood. That is where they ones who can’t play in the NFL go now.
You seem to be referencing the fans, but I am asking about the players. Not what the fans are going to watch, but what will happen to all those 6 foot+ lightening quick monsters who can’t play football anymore.
I’m well aware the skillsets are not the exact same between NFL and Rugby, but they still seem a lot closer to Rugby than they do to Baseball, basketball or soccer. So why wouldn’t these guys gravitate towards the sport they are most likely to be successful in?
Agree with all of this, but:
What people aren’t taking into account is the massive advantage the US has in terms of sheer size. Even if only 1/5 of all football fans became rugby fans, it would instantly make the US the biggest rugby-playing nation in the world.
Athletes and fans aren’t going to switch back to baseball – it lost popularity for a reason, and that is the slow pace. Basketball and Soccer would draw fans, but the skillsets and body types that they select for are radically different. Hockey and Lacrosse would boom. But some fraction of fans/athletes would see rugby as the closest equivalent, and turn to it, and that’s all that’s needed.
It would take a little bit of time as players learned the new skills, but even there, outside of the kicking, rugby is more dependant on pure athleticism than, e.g. all of the sports named above. Give a rugby coach a guy that’s 230 lbs and can run a 4.6 40, and he can teach the rest. The US produces dozens of those kinds of athletes every year.
I’d expect the US to field a top-level team within 3-5 years.
That assumes they can make a living at it. Those guys would have to move to Canada to play in the CFL or overseas for rugby. They can’t make a living playing rugby in the US. Even if they wanted to go into rugby, they need somebody to pay them to play. They’re not going to replicate their multi-million dollar salaries playing rugby. For reference, the highest paid professional rugby players in the world makes a bit more than NFL league minimum. And that’s overseas. Even MLS, which has been going for a while, pays many their players a middle class salary.
And if that’s the case, they’re going to find other employment rather than playing rugby. A lot of those guys would be better off getting office jobs or selling insurance, and so they will.
But wouldn’t that just drive the development of rugby in the US? No, for the reasons listed above. It takes decades at a minimum to get a sport that popular and even then, it takes even longer before you can sustain an ecosystem of hundreds, if not thousands, of players (MLS and the UFC in the US being good examples of this).
I bet it would be faster than that. You wouldn’t have to necessarily recruit new athletes, but rather retrain existing young college and pro football players.
I mean, you could take someone like say… Cedric Ogbuehi or Spencer Drango and turn them into prop forwards, or turn someone like Dax Prescott into a half-back without overly much trouble, I’d think.
I’d say that American Football and Rugby are closer together as games than just about any other games that are played, excluding variants of a game (i.e. indoor soccer vs. regular soccer, etc…)
To what end? Without a well paying professional league as a goal why would young athletes pursue rugby in great numbers? If those guys are tremendous athletes they would be more likely to focus their attention on sports that have a big financial reward. Unless something changes in rugby (please correct me if I’m wrong) there’s not much money in it for these guys.
Actually, UFC is an example of a sport that went from nothing to multimillions in about a decade.
More the point: historical precedent is useless, as the OP is explicitly positing a hypothetical unlike anything that’s ever happened, in which a multibillion dollar industry is outlawed. The closest equivalent would be Prohibition.
If just 5% of the fans that followed the NFL decided that the National Rugby League was the next best thing, it would support a pro league with six-figure salaries for the players. If 10% of fans did, salaries for top players would get into the low millions. I can’t imagine that that league wouldn’t emerge nearly overnight. Actually, the real confusion would come from a dozen competing pro rugby leagues forming at once.
I don’t think this is true. A player with no experience trying to compete with a world class player who has been playing in the position since childhood within the space of two years? It’d be a bloodbath and he’d get pushed all over the place. Propping is more than a strength test (and a lot of the strength that is being tested is in muscles that don’t usually get exercised, for example in your neck and across the top of your shoulders), there’s a lot of technique and dirty tricks involved too.
Further, Cedric Ogbuehi looks to be completely the wrong shape to play in the front row as does Spencer Drango, from photographs on the Internet, and looks like he’d be in the second row. For a world class prop you’re looking for somebody around 20 stone, 6ft in height, with large amounts of strength in their neck and upper body, and who can run non-stop for 80 minutes from one side of the pitch to the other. I’m sure there’s players that fit those criteria, but those two aren’t it.
Maybe. The main issue is retraining them for a lot more endurance that American football demands. Don’t know how long it takes to get guys who have prepared for short intense bursts to have the wind for rugby.
For a few people, yes. But it was more like 15 years. After a decade, UFC lost about $30-$40M.
MLS is a similar situation.
I guess my point wasn’t especially well made, but it’s that even if a sport like UFC can get popular within a decade (and it has), it only supports a very select few athletes at a high paying level. And won’t be able to support hundreds, much less the thousands of current NFL players at the same financial level for at least another decade or two, if that.
And that’s my point. Getting fan support up to that level takes time and quite a bit of luck. Yeah, if fans suddenly decided rugby was the next big thing, you’d get big contracts.
That’s an awfully big “if”.
It’s also an awfully big “if” that assuming it did happen, that current NFL players could transition to those roles rather than seeing a flood of international players come here for payouts or more experienced college students taking those spots.
Basically, there’s a lot of very unlikely things that have to happen for current NFL players to jump successfully to professional rugby in the event professional football was suddenly banned.
It’s not entirely unsupported, either. Some professional rugby players have given shots at entering the NFL. Not very successfully, I might add. People who have played the game for years are going to be better at it, despite overall athletic ability.
Sorry, but we’re miles apart. The OP isn’t asking if it would be as big as the NFL; it obviously wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be half as big. It doesn’t have to be.
Without checking the numbers, I’d bet that the NFL is over 10 times bigger in terms of revenue/attendance/TV viewership than the rugby leagues in Australia, etc. Certainly NFL+College is. In order to think a pro rugby league wouldn’t be viable, you have to assume that not even one in ten disappointed football fans would conclude rugby is the next best thing. IMO that’s absurd.
Heck, if 2% of the fans/money switched to rugby, it would probably support at least a small league with $100k type salaries. For the vast majority of guys now playing college ball and looking toward the NFL, that’s still a job they’ll compete like hell for.
As far as the significance of pro rugby players failing at football … that’s the point. They fail because they’re competing against athletes drawn from a much, much larger talent pool (also probably becuase they don’t have much time to develop the different technique.
I mean, if you think someone like Adrian Peterson or Leveon Bell couldn’t, with a year or two of coaching, cut it as world-class winger … sorry, we’re miles apart.
I don’t think that’s necessarily so. There are thresholds below which viable national leagues in the US simply don’t seem to work. Look at the various soccer leagues, women’s basketball, etc.
Here’s an article about Major League Lacrosse - http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303640104577436811966763578?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303640104577436811966763578.html
I have no idea if this would be similar to the early years of the proposed Rugby league but no lacrosse player has quit his day job.
I know a lot of ex college football players that get into rugby. In fact I’m one of them. I played college football at 6’6" 320 and about 4 years after I graduated I played rugby at 280. The biggest difference is teaching the guys to slow down and not go all out each possession and to tackle differently. It took me two years to get into rugby shape and most of that was training for a half marathon on the side while I was practicing rugby but I also hadn’t done anything athletic in years when I started.
I don’t think it would take more then a decade for the U.S. to be very competitive on the international stage. The Eagles are terrible because they get athletes who weren’t good enough to play another team sport. If we took not only the athletes who are good enough to Make the NFL but actually be superstars we would be competitive in every game within a year or two.
I would suggest the following team
Full Back - Adam Jones
Wings - Chris Johnson
Marquise Goodwin
Center - Collin Kaepernick
Andrew Luck
Fly Half - Aaron Rodgers
Scrum Half - Russell Wilson
8 man - Richard Sherman
Flankers - JJ Watt
Patrick Willis
Locks - Michael Hoomanawanui
Gary Barnidge
Props - Jason Kelce
Ndamukong Suh
Hooker - Elvis Dumervil
Obviously we don’t know anything about their kicking ability but all of these guys get to handle the football at least occasionally and should be able to develop endurance for rugby and learn the game.