Context: a thing on social media right now is women asking husbands/boyfriends how often they think about the Roman Empire, and then giggling and expressing surprise when the answer is, in every case, more than “almost never”.
The humor seems to come from there being a large body of people (mostly women, evidently?) who don’t realize anyone who’s not, like, a classics professor, thinks about the Roman Empire more than almost-never, and another (evidently mostly men?) who don’t get how someone could think about it less than at least once a week, assuming they think about anything at all.
I’m firmly in the “how do you not?” camp. The mutual confusion between these two groups is the joke, I think.
Another facet may be the implication that all these men must be obsessed with Rome or want a return of the Roman Empire or something, which is also a funny notion, but I don’t think that’s usually the case. There are dozens of other things I think about at least as often, personally, and the common thread is that they have lots of connections to various topics I’m interested in, not some obsession with e.g. Rome.
For my part, Rome is heavily connected to all of philosophy, politics, European, Maghreb, and Near-East history, literature, and film (it’s a common setting or topic, even when not directly the topic, as in the Coen’s Hail Caesar) and since I’m interested in all those things, I mean, yeah, obviously I think about it at least once a day. I also think about various ancient Greek states daily, and Sumer and Ancient Egypt at least once a week, and often much more, I’d guess. Doesn’t mean I’m particularly obsessed with any of them, they’re just strongly connected to a ton of my interests.
Pretty sure I passed some sort of test with my wife when I told her "Oh, think about it and not in the context of it coming up in a book or legal concept, but just sit and ponder the Empire? Once every six months or so?" but then rapidly lost ground when I continued, "Maybe slightly more if you include the Republic, the Byzantine Empire, and any of the purported successor entities like Tsarist Russia or the Ottomans."
The equally amusing thing is the trend to ask "What is the Roman Empire for people who don't think about the Roman Empire?" The answer for a SHOCKING number of people is Tom Holland lip syncing 'Umbrella'. And as astonishing and inconceivable as that is to me--that someone could think about that multiple times per year, much less the more frequent schedule my wife, who is deeply, boldy intelligent, joyously admits to--I'm reminded that that's EXACTLY how they feel about people who think about Rome. So I just shrug and say "well people like different things."
Seems more likely to me that all of you are just bad at estimating your past thoughts you neither think about Tom Holland nor the Roman Empire nearly as much as you believe.
Or we're spot on and different people have things that stick in their minds, that frame their mindset, that drive their creativity, whatever. I'm not prepared to question anyone's testimony about something as funny and trivial as this. It's just another excellent example that we are all very different people.
Lady Gaga's performance of "Paparazzi" at the 2009 VMA awards for me. But also the Roman empire. I just finished making a table. Whole time I was wondering how the hell anyone without cast iron base plates on their power tools could ever make such a thing, and that for sure included the Roman empire. What was life like for a regular guy back then who wanted a table? Crazy.
Once you throw in all the things before (Roman kingdom, Roman republic, who the heck were the Etruscans anyways, things of that nature) and after (who was the last person in what's now Spain to think of themselves as a Roman subject? Holy Roman empire: pretty wild huh; is there a through-line of kin based organized crime to the classical era?) you've basically got the last 2000+ years of history. So it's easy to count just about everything as "the Roman empire" with the level of handwaving I'm comfortable doing.
This isn't to say I'm stuck there. Pre Indo-european Europe is wild. The Tang Dynasty is wild. People settling high up in the Andes or Rockies or Himalayas is insane to me. So there's a lot to think about!
What I love deeply about this reply, is that the "you think about the Roman Empire?" people would absolutely gesticulate wildly, then point, and breathlessly exclaim "SEE? I DO NOT DO THIS!"
I mean, I get you. I just watched a youtube video about the first normal person in history whose name we know unambiguously, and it was this delightful dive into the fact that people just like us were keeping track of beer a few thousand years ago and that stuff just makes me fizz. I love it. I want my life to be long and free enough for me to learn at least a little bit about the pre-Indus Valley culture that brought some absolutely unique cultural features to the culture of what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan that cannot be traced to anywhere but that one geographic location. Or Basque language -- why did it, and no other, pre-Indo European language survive? My brain is consumed by this, and so it is statistically likely that I'm going to stumble into the Romans here and there.
This is fundamentally different than some of my acquaintances who think about Rome disturbingly often because, I think, they believe they could be emperor someday and would do a better job of it than this democracy nonsense.
Like if you think about plumbing, Christianity, anything Europe, WW1, the Renissance, or Government all those things have pretty direct ties back to the Roman empires,
and more if you include the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantines in that.
It's just another Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars type of thing that sounds like a typical article from Cosmo discussed at the hair salon. The irony of my comment is not lost and is intended
Supporting a prior state of affairs over the current one (in this case, older forms of money and monetary policy; and maybe also economic systems and/or attitudes toward colonialism, it’s not entirely clear which aspects the poster intends us to understand as causing the claimed price consistency) is what “reactionary” means.
Yes thank you, that is what “reactionary” means. But the post only mentions the Romans in order to draw a comparison (albeit likely based on faulty information), and then asks how others feel about it. This isn’t support for past eras. It’s a curiosity into the current state of affairs using as comparison the only available reference: the past.
Your own difficulty in understanding the poster’s intent underlies the problem with the “reactionary” label. They could simply be misinformed. Misinformation leads to dissonance, surprise and curiosity. Which leads to posting online to settle their inner confusion/questions.
I read the poster’s question as leading due to extensive interaction online with that kind of sea-lioning or otherwise promoting a point of view (always one of a few, and mostly clustered in one ideological area that definitely includes love of precious metal standards) by posting (often wrong or biased) sources, framing them a certain (also often wrong) way, then asking what others think about that. It’s also a great way to accomplish (classical) trolling, by making a post that’s weak and controversial (so, invites replies, including from those who will refute it poorly, which is the OP’s lead—in to goad them further by responding only to weak rebuttals) but can hide behind ignorance or naivety (“I really wasn’t sure, I was just asking”) to skirt moderation.
But there’s a tiny chance it’s not any of that and the poster really is, literally, just asking questions. From the form and topic of the post, I give it about, I dunno, a 3% likelihood.
[edit] why do I judge this almost certainly not a genuine question born of curiosity? There are several clues, but the post leads with “reminder that…” This indicates a ready line of argument and/or beloved second-hand ideological factoid the poster has picked up and has ready to mind. The post almost certainly has a slant, and if it does, yes, it’s reactionary.
> The post almost certainly has a slant, and if it does, yes, it’s reactionary.
You and the poster must know each other quite well. I on the other hand don’t know them at all (as far as I know). And their past visible comments don’t suggest habitual trolling. With little else to go on seems best for me to give them the benefit of the doubt.
In my head, there's now a "Number of days since I thought about the Roman Empire" sign and it just went to 0 when I read this headline. Though I feel like this should sneak by on a technicality, namely that I didn't think about it.
Are you just interested in history and noticing it? Of course, we always see links to the wonderful site https://acoup.blog by Dr. Bret C. Devereaux on HN, so maybe that's why?
It' interesting how American Football is perceived as more violent when Rugby exists and is a lot more brutal. Futból (in Spanish to distinguish it) in its simplest form seems non-violent but the players can be just as merciful and the fans just as bad.
Is rugby more brutal? More kinetic, I easily agree with. Reading the data, it seems that concussions are indeed higher in rugby, such that that should be concerning.
That said, the specialization allowed by American Football results in some people that can hit far harder than should be encouraged. Especially true in youth sports, in my mind, as growth just isn't even by age for people. At least in professional leagues you can somewhat control for that.
I subscribe to the perspective that brain injuries are the injuries that matter most in sports, so that's what I focus on in the "what's more dangerous" question.
I had believed that rugby carried a lower concussion risk because of the lack of padding/helmets changed player behavior, but it looks like that's not the case.
This[1] is one of the best analysis/discussions I found.
It references this[2] 2021 meta-analysis as the most expansive.
A few key quotes:
> This meta-analysis demonstrated rugby has the highest concussion risk, followed by American Football, ice hockey, and wrestling.
> Meanwhile, a 2015 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine looked at 13 articles that addressed sports concussion rates. It found that rugby placed first, with a rate more than three times higher than ice hockey and eight times higher than American football.
> One paper, published in 2016 in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, looked at NCAA Division I injuries over three seasons for both sports. The authors found that the overall injury rate was about three times higher in rugby than in American football, and that a subset of this, the concussion rate, was about 2.5 times higher in rugby than in football. The authors deemed these differences to represent a "substantially higher" risk for rugby.
TL;DR: Rugby's probably the most dangerous for concussions and overall injury of any major team sport.
At the professional level Brian injuries are the most important, but most pro athletes are often absolutely wrecking their body.
However, at the level of high school students concussions are significant but joint injuries are more likely to be life altering. Of course that’s less impactful per person than death, TBI, spinal injuries, etc but you also see that stuff from people driving to and from less dangerous sports so there’s many ways to slice this stuff.
Consider vastly more football players people have died getting to the event than at the event. So arguably the biggest way to make these sports safer is to ban players traveling long distances to events.
However, when you consider the NFL, which had a similar lawsuit, it is making more money than ever and not having trouble recruiting people to play, so I dunno. The sport itself will likely be OK.
As an aside, this article features Chris Nowinski, who is a leader in this field. If this topic interests you, you might enjoy reading his book Head Games or following him on socials.
Awesome links! I'll try to dive on both, a little at least. I think it is safe to say both sports should continue to get the attention they are getting with regards to safety. Hopefully they follow up on that more.
I'm curious on how the data works by position. Thinking on it for a moment, I'd expect risk of injury for most positions in American Football is low. Such that, for the entire sport, this data actually does make a lot of sense. However, it is also easy to see that positions like quarterback are far more likely to get certain kinds of injuries. To the credit of the league, many of the more severe injuries that we saw years ago would be illegal hits in today's game.
Again, this data does make sense. And I think it is safe to say that rugby is almost certainly more dangerous.
I also used to ascribe to the belief that rugby had fewer concussions (as a collegiate/semi-pro rugby player) but I wasn't aware of these data, thanks for sharing.
In retrospect, it makes sense to me. I think the nature of rugby collisions and how you play the game just lends itself to more concussions than American football. A lot of AF is throwing passes which get broken up by less violent hits versus in rugby the only way is to tackle the guy carrying the ball.
The problem with these studies is that they gather their stats from doctors. I have no idea about Rugby, but American football has a very real culture of hiding concussions at all costs. If the only statistics they're using are from team doctors, they are GROSSLY underestimating the number of concussions in an average football season.
There's a belief that the average lineman is suffering some form of brain damage on pretty much every down they're in the game.
I remember reading a study that showed women's soccer was actually the highest concussion risk of any sport. It's been a few years but it stood out to me at the time.
Isn't it just artefact of American Football being culturally important in America while Rugby is simply not? Americans watch American Football and their kids play it. Rugby is a niche sport, people just do not think about it.
I recognize this is anecdata, but the first concussion I got was playing Rugby - the first day I went out - not all the years I spent playing American Football up to that point. American Football is a far more controlled game, and the bodies are spread out over more of the field. I believe both of these points are important differences to understand injury risk. With Rugby, the pace is non-stop and the bodies are massed closer together. The lack of protective gear is also a factor.
In terms of perception - American Football is simply better known. I bet if you stood on a street corner and asked 50 people to tell you something about Rugby, they would describe it as soccer but you get to carry the ball.
>they would describe it as soccer but you get to carry the ball.
that's an interesting bet/theory. i would never have expected that as a description. like, even after hearing the description, i can't imagine how it could have come to be.
which is a succinct example of why "X like Y, but different" type of descriptions are horrible. the "Uber of ______" type of elevator pitches are just so lame and uninspired, really benefit no one.
No, but their main (but not only!) activity is judging balls and strikes (whether a pitch that was not hit passed through an imaginary rectangle defined by the height of the batter’s knees and armpits, and the sides of home plate) and in Cricket the pitcher (?) wants to hit the wicket (?) such that you don’t need to judge that (the sticks do, by getting knocked over, or not getting knocked over)
I usually learn rules and terminology to sports I’ve played little or not at all, by playing sports video games. I’ve yet to find ones for rugby or cricket that I liked, so continue to barely understand them.
FWIW in Australia we have reasonable exposure to baseball (and/or softball and even "rounders", both of which we got to play at school a few times), so much of the terminology and the basic rules are well enough known. I wouldn't say the same for gridiron though, which I've never seen played here at all.
Do you even see people playing cricket anywhere in the US? Surely in areas with large subcontinental populations (SV?) there'd be some uptake?
> Do you even see people playing cricket anywhere in the US
It’s not impossible to find, and exactly where you’d expect: the closer you are to a major population center, and the larger & more internationally-prestigious the nearest university, the more like you are to see it in the wild.
But over most of the US, yeah, you could easily go your whole life and never even see a cricket bat in person, let alone a match being played.
Rugby seems to be a significantly more popular than cricket, though still uncommon, considered over the whole geography of the country.
Fair enough, hadn't thought of it that way. Though of course cricket has a stumps (bowler's end) umpire too, who has to judge if the delivery is legal (i.e. it must not be "thrown" and the bowler's foot must be behind the line etc. And if the ball is too wide the batting team gets a "free" run etc.), and whether a catch taken by the keeper was off the bat, or if the batter used their legs to prevent the ball hitting the stumps etc etc.
Some cricket match that was on at the pub when I was visiting New Zealand had me mesmerized on the level of "judging". In baseball, there's the checked swing to consider in being considered a strike. In cricket, they have mics and listen for the strike to judge. There were other similar things that just revealed why a cricket test can last for days, and made me wish for the "speed" of a baseball game.
Maybe because rugby is a flowing game like soccer, minutes of play before a referee blows the whistle. Football is stop and go, only a few seconds before a play is over, by design. It's paced like baseball. Rugby and soccer are like basketball. Volleyball is somewhere in between.
The big difference is the continuous nature of the game- rather than a serious of short plays, there are two 40-minute halves, during which the ball is in play, and in motion, continuously until it either leaves the field (whether by someone scoring or via a touchline) or a rule is broken that requires the ball to be given to the other team. There are also very limited tactical substitutions, in contrast to American football's platoon system where specialist offensive and defensive teams alternate being on the field.
This means that a rugby player must be able to keep running for the whole match, so they can't be as big as the biggest NFL players. For example the heaviest player on the England rugby team, prop Will Stuart, weighs in at 291 lb (most of his teammates, even those who play the same position, are significantly lighter). Every single offensive lineman on the current Chiefs roster, plus several players in other positions, is heavier than him.
Another effect of the stop-start nature of American football, and in particular the system of downs, is that small differences in how far the ball advances are often very important, and are more important than actually bringing the ball carrier down. In American football, a tackle is a head-on collision between the ball carrier and (often) several defensive players, with the aim of immediately stopping the forward progress of the ball. A rugby tackle is usually one player, often from behind, wrapping his arms around the ball carrier's legs to bring him down, at which point he has to give up the ball but play continues. It's designed to bring him down as efficiently as possible (because play won't stop), while leaving the tackler's teammates free to tackle whoever receives the ball if the ball carrier can get rid of it.
Or in English you can distinguish it as "Association Football", which abbreviates to "soccer" by dropping the leading vowel and the suffix from "association", and then tacking on the customary English rhotic ending.
Exactly. Football today is the safest its ever been, especially at the high school level.
There is no sport on earth that brings in more diverse people in terms of body types, sizes, races and forces them to work together to achieve their goals. You can't be selfish in football or the team suffers.
Whether you're a huge offensive lineman protecting the skinnier and more studious quarterback, a tall and fast wide receiver, a short / quick running back, any type of defender or one of the multiple kicking positions...there is a place for you on the team. The team that in college can be up to 120 players who train together, study together and support each other to succeed.
There's no sport that brings people and communities together better than football, because it's the most inclusive sport out there.
The article states that the gladiators were just slaves to be treated as disposable but I thought this wasn’t actually true. In the sense that they were fairly expensive and they didn’t want them killing each other all the time and they weren’t exactly casting lots of them into free for all death matches.
Yup that's true and my favorite history youtuber, ToldInStone (PHD in Ancient Roman Studies), covers this in one of his books - "Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants". Highly recommend it, it's a bunch of short stories on tales n myths about the ancient world which he goes into detail on.
The USA, like many countries, loves equating itself to Rome. We've been doing it from day 1. Look at our buildings. Look at the Society of the Cincinnati. All our mottos are in Latin (except "In God We Trust," which we picked up in the 1950s and kept in English presumably because foreign languages were for commies). Comparing oneself to Rome is a beloved hobby of nations around the world.
Guy has an extremely surface level and superficial take on American Football. His diatribe against football sounds like something a 15 year old faux-marxist would write...Football is a complicated sport. It's incredibly difficult to piece together the real chess game that's taking place but once you do, and once you understand the orchestration that goes into play calling (defense and offense), it unlocks the incredible nature of the sport. It's a real time war-game that's orchestrated by coaches and players on the field... You have a coach that invents defensive schemes on the fly (Bill Belichek) vs a coach that will scour the history of teh sport and call a play last seen in a 1940's rose bowl (Andy Reid).
Yeah, I watch football for casual time-filling on Sunday afternoon but I know that I know just enough to realize I'm only seeing about 10% of the game.
Idgaf about football for the most part, but I’m interested in understanding plays. Is there a primer on the theory or something out there? I learned everything I know about football from a cellphone 16 bit football game.
YouTube is a great resource for this. Channels like The QB School, Football Analysis, and AllexRollinsNFL just name a few examples. Getting a 22 man view with a knowledgeable guide is a great way to understand the thought that goes into each play.
My only question is why AC/DC? Surely American bands have produced enough great sports worthy anthems that you needn't import music from the other side of the world (where "football" means something entirely different, and gridiron is very much an extreme niche activity)?
Though I do remember an ex who grew up in the states assuming Acka Dacka must be a US band due to the "knocking me out with those American thighs" line!
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] thread(My personal answer would be "multiple times a day.")
Edit: https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/why-do-men-think-...
Edit2: It has nothing to do with power and little to do with battles. It's more about society, governance, and culture.
I’m firmly in the “how do you not?” camp. The mutual confusion between these two groups is the joke, I think.
Another facet may be the implication that all these men must be obsessed with Rome or want a return of the Roman Empire or something, which is also a funny notion, but I don’t think that’s usually the case. There are dozens of other things I think about at least as often, personally, and the common thread is that they have lots of connections to various topics I’m interested in, not some obsession with e.g. Rome.
For my part, Rome is heavily connected to all of philosophy, politics, European, Maghreb, and Near-East history, literature, and film (it’s a common setting or topic, even when not directly the topic, as in the Coen’s Hail Caesar) and since I’m interested in all those things, I mean, yeah, obviously I think about it at least once a day. I also think about various ancient Greek states daily, and Sumer and Ancient Egypt at least once a week, and often much more, I’d guess. Doesn’t mean I’m particularly obsessed with any of them, they’re just strongly connected to a ton of my interests.
The equally amusing thing is the trend to ask "What is the Roman Empire for people who don't think about the Roman Empire?" The answer for a SHOCKING number of people is Tom Holland lip syncing 'Umbrella'. And as astonishing and inconceivable as that is to me--that someone could think about that multiple times per year, much less the more frequent schedule my wife, who is deeply, boldy intelligent, joyously admits to--I'm reminded that that's EXACTLY how they feel about people who think about Rome. So I just shrug and say "well people like different things."
Once you throw in all the things before (Roman kingdom, Roman republic, who the heck were the Etruscans anyways, things of that nature) and after (who was the last person in what's now Spain to think of themselves as a Roman subject? Holy Roman empire: pretty wild huh; is there a through-line of kin based organized crime to the classical era?) you've basically got the last 2000+ years of history. So it's easy to count just about everything as "the Roman empire" with the level of handwaving I'm comfortable doing.
This isn't to say I'm stuck there. Pre Indo-european Europe is wild. The Tang Dynasty is wild. People settling high up in the Andes or Rockies or Himalayas is insane to me. So there's a lot to think about!
I mean, I get you. I just watched a youtube video about the first normal person in history whose name we know unambiguously, and it was this delightful dive into the fact that people just like us were keeping track of beer a few thousand years ago and that stuff just makes me fizz. I love it. I want my life to be long and free enough for me to learn at least a little bit about the pre-Indus Valley culture that brought some absolutely unique cultural features to the culture of what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan that cannot be traced to anywhere but that one geographic location. Or Basque language -- why did it, and no other, pre-Indo European language survive? My brain is consumed by this, and so it is statistically likely that I'm going to stumble into the Romans here and there.
This is fundamentally different than some of my acquaintances who think about Rome disturbingly often because, I think, they believe they could be emperor someday and would do a better job of it than this democracy nonsense.
Like if you think about plumbing, Christianity, anything Europe, WW1, the Renissance, or Government all those things have pretty direct ties back to the Roman empires,
and more if you include the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantines in that.
Your own difficulty in understanding the poster’s intent underlies the problem with the “reactionary” label. They could simply be misinformed. Misinformation leads to dissonance, surprise and curiosity. Which leads to posting online to settle their inner confusion/questions.
But there’s a tiny chance it’s not any of that and the poster really is, literally, just asking questions. From the form and topic of the post, I give it about, I dunno, a 3% likelihood.
[edit] why do I judge this almost certainly not a genuine question born of curiosity? There are several clues, but the post leads with “reminder that…” This indicates a ready line of argument and/or beloved second-hand ideological factoid the poster has picked up and has ready to mind. The post almost certainly has a slant, and if it does, yes, it’s reactionary.
You and the poster must know each other quite well. I on the other hand don’t know them at all (as far as I know). And their past visible comments don’t suggest habitual trolling. With little else to go on seems best for me to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Yeah, we do brunch most Sundays. It’s definitely that instead of what I wrote as the reason. You figured it out.
That said, the specialization allowed by American Football results in some people that can hit far harder than should be encouraged. Especially true in youth sports, in my mind, as growth just isn't even by age for people. At least in professional leagues you can somewhat control for that.
I had believed that rugby carried a lower concussion risk because of the lack of padding/helmets changed player behavior, but it looks like that's not the case.
This[1] is one of the best analysis/discussions I found.
It references this[2] 2021 meta-analysis as the most expansive.
A few key quotes:
> This meta-analysis demonstrated rugby has the highest concussion risk, followed by American Football, ice hockey, and wrestling.
> Meanwhile, a 2015 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine looked at 13 articles that addressed sports concussion rates. It found that rugby placed first, with a rate more than three times higher than ice hockey and eight times higher than American football.
> One paper, published in 2016 in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, looked at NCAA Division I injuries over three seasons for both sports. The authors found that the overall injury rate was about three times higher in rugby than in American football, and that a subset of this, the concussion rate, was about 2.5 times higher in rugby than in football. The authors deemed these differences to represent a "substantially higher" risk for rugby.
TL;DR: Rugby's probably the most dangerous for concussions and overall injury of any major team sport.
[1] https://www.wral.com/story/fact-check-biden-says-football-is...
[2] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23776916-concussion-...
However, at the level of high school students concussions are significant but joint injuries are more likely to be life altering. Of course that’s less impactful per person than death, TBI, spinal injuries, etc but you also see that stuff from people driving to and from less dangerous sports so there’s many ways to slice this stuff.
Consider vastly more football players people have died getting to the event than at the event. So arguably the biggest way to make these sports safer is to ban players traveling long distances to events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepherding_(Australian_rules_...
No idea about severity or frequency of incidents but the (very few) matches I happened to watch were far more "physical" than rugby.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/nfl-style-lawsuit-br...
However, when you consider the NFL, which had a similar lawsuit, it is making more money than ever and not having trouble recruiting people to play, so I dunno. The sport itself will likely be OK.
As an aside, this article features Chris Nowinski, who is a leader in this field. If this topic interests you, you might enjoy reading his book Head Games or following him on socials.
I'm curious on how the data works by position. Thinking on it for a moment, I'd expect risk of injury for most positions in American Football is low. Such that, for the entire sport, this data actually does make a lot of sense. However, it is also easy to see that positions like quarterback are far more likely to get certain kinds of injuries. To the credit of the league, many of the more severe injuries that we saw years ago would be illegal hits in today's game.
Again, this data does make sense. And I think it is safe to say that rugby is almost certainly more dangerous.
In retrospect, it makes sense to me. I think the nature of rugby collisions and how you play the game just lends itself to more concussions than American football. A lot of AF is throwing passes which get broken up by less violent hits versus in rugby the only way is to tackle the guy carrying the ball.
There's a belief that the average lineman is suffering some form of brain damage on pretty much every down they're in the game.
https://www.thebiglead.com/posts/linemen-are-more-prone-to-c...
In terms of perception - American Football is simply better known. I bet if you stood on a street corner and asked 50 people to tell you something about Rugby, they would describe it as soccer but you get to carry the ball.
that's an interesting bet/theory. i would never have expected that as a description. like, even after hearing the description, i can't imagine how it could have come to be.
My attempt at a succinct explanation would be “football (American) but they start plays all bunched up instead of in lines”.
I’m sure it’s very wrong.
Cricket would be “baseball, but the home plate umpire is made of sticks”.
in Cricket, the Bowler
I usually learn rules and terminology to sports I’ve played little or not at all, by playing sports video games. I’ve yet to find ones for rugby or cricket that I liked, so continue to barely understand them.
It’s not impossible to find, and exactly where you’d expect: the closer you are to a major population center, and the larger & more internationally-prestigious the nearest university, the more like you are to see it in the wild.
But over most of the US, yeah, you could easily go your whole life and never even see a cricket bat in person, let alone a match being played.
Rugby seems to be a significantly more popular than cricket, though still uncommon, considered over the whole geography of the country.
Is there something fundamentally different with rugby that they don’t need nearly as much equipment?
This means that a rugby player must be able to keep running for the whole match, so they can't be as big as the biggest NFL players. For example the heaviest player on the England rugby team, prop Will Stuart, weighs in at 291 lb (most of his teammates, even those who play the same position, are significantly lighter). Every single offensive lineman on the current Chiefs roster, plus several players in other positions, is heavier than him.
Another effect of the stop-start nature of American football, and in particular the system of downs, is that small differences in how far the ball advances are often very important, and are more important than actually bringing the ball carrier down. In American football, a tackle is a head-on collision between the ball carrier and (often) several defensive players, with the aim of immediately stopping the forward progress of the ball. A rugby tackle is usually one player, often from behind, wrapping his arms around the ball carrier's legs to bring him down, at which point he has to give up the ball but play continues. It's designed to bring him down as efficiently as possible (because play won't stop), while leaving the tackler's teammates free to tackle whoever receives the ball if the ball carrier can get rid of it.
Or in English you can distinguish it as "Association Football", which abbreviates to "soccer" by dropping the leading vowel and the suffix from "association", and then tacking on the customary English rhotic ending.
There is no sport on earth that brings in more diverse people in terms of body types, sizes, races and forces them to work together to achieve their goals. You can't be selfish in football or the team suffers.
Whether you're a huge offensive lineman protecting the skinnier and more studious quarterback, a tall and fast wide receiver, a short / quick running back, any type of defender or one of the multiple kicking positions...there is a place for you on the team. The team that in college can be up to 120 players who train together, study together and support each other to succeed.
There's no sport that brings people and communities together better than football, because it's the most inclusive sport out there.
For example, we tolerated an article equating Rome to the USA.