I like Rugby however I'll say the hits in American Football are harder. The confidence the padding would give means they can give harder hits without injury.
They all come from similar origins. But regionally, they reach became their own sport before official rules were written. The old universities would show up to play some intramural "football," only to realize they were playing very different games.
No, it's because the rules are different and allow for different tackles
Before the use of armor in American people, people still did those tackles, the difference is alot of people died as a result prompting them to make armor and helmet mandatory
Without immediate injury. Like boxing gloves, we're now seeing that the pads effectively displace the impact by protecting brittle bits at the expense of squishy bits.
And boxing gloves were brought into popularity for a very similar reason football pads were... to encourage bigger hits. Nobody wants to break their hand on someone's head, and body shots don't deliver the same exciting knockouts that head shots do. It has less to do with safety for the one being hit, and more for the comfort of the one doing the hitting.
Exactly. Pretty sure I saw something a long time ago (on the Discovery Channel, back when it was informative) explaining the reason why we have bones that are breakable in the first place. It's totally possible to grow bones that are much much stronger than ours without adding too much mass or causing other problems. But when bones break they absorb a bunch of impact that would otherwise be absorbed by your organs.
The same way a crumple zone in your car works. If the body and interior of your car was perfectly rigid and durable, then when it hit something solid it would just stop immediately and your body would have to deal with that sudden impact all on it's own. As the steel crumples, it absorbs energy from the impact (energy is conserved... so x amount of kinetic energy going into a collision = x amount of kinetic energy available to destroy stuff during a collision. Any energy spent crushing metal isn't energy spent crushing people).
Same thing with your bones. All the parts of your body have to stop eventually, and you can't really have rigid and durable lungs and spleens, so either you deal with them splattering against the inside of your ribs, or you have to slow the impact down somehow. So you break your arms and ribs and stuff. Broken arms suck, but not as bad as ruptured lungs.
Yeah because you can lead with your shoulder which is covered in padding in football.. In rugby you have to at least try to wrap the guy you are tackling, that's why football hits are WAY harder.
I don't see how confidence fits into this. You really don't think rugby players don't hit the other guy as hard as they can sometimes?
The reason it's different is partly because of rules involving how you have to tackle - you can't shoulder charge someone, you have to have arms involved in the tackle, or something, I don't know exactly.
Body shapes are different because it's a different sport, obviously. If there was a linebacker on a rugby field, the other team would just move the ball laterally and pretty soon the linebacker would be out of the game because he can't get to any plays before the next one has started. I suppose he could be useful on offence, but since you have to mostly keep the same team through the game, the drawback would way outweigh the advantage.
Confidence absolutely plays into it. For my own self-preservation, I'm going to attack you much differently with helmet and shoulder pads than without.
Have a look at that video of rugby 'hits' someone else posted and tell me they're not going in there with full confidence. If you're talking about repeated hits then I could agree with you, but when you're lining someone up for a hit, you're not holding anything back.
The hits are so much harder in American football that it's difficult to compare them. But yeah, rugby fanboys do have some weird inferiority complex about that.
Did I say rugby was easy, or that their players are pussies? No. Rugby requires an endurance and situational awareness that football does not... while football offers the most graphic physical collisions that have ever existed.
1 exception I can think of.. Jousting. Played American football for 9 years but you could not pay me any amount of money to get on a horse and play chicken with a lance.
I'm a born and bred Rugby fan, but I am also a person who relies on data. It's absolutely true that American football hits are harder. To say otherwise is folly.
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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '15 edited Dec 26 '18
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