American and Rugby Football

[Arneb]

What is/are the substantial difference/s between the two? A few minor things are obvious:

Jersey, shorts and a loud voice vs. armoured vehicles and wireless intercom.
Grimey, toothless men vs. glittering cheerleaders
Played in selected spots over the entire globe vs. played in the USA
A (one) manager vs. scores of training specialists
Scrum vs. scrimmage
low vs. high tech

Still, to me it looks as largely the same game with different costumes. Where is the real difference? Maybe someone who is knowledgeable in both sports can explain?

I know, I can just slap up Wikipedia and research the relevant articles, but maybe someone helpful here, in their own words...

[Heid the Ba]

A (one) manager vs. scores of training specialists

These days teams have a variety of coaches, probably 5-6 at least.

low vs. high tech

Top rugby teams are just as high tech.

Where is the real difference? Maybe someone who is knowledgeable in both sports can explain?

The forward pass in american football is the main difference, closely followed by play stopping after every down. It is more like rugby league than rugby union.

Rugby started to experiment with padding and player protection about 10 - 12 years ago but found that just made players mopre reckless and cuased more injuries.

[Arneb]

Oh dear. And the difference between League and Union are...

[Мастер]

Oh dear. And the difference between League and Union are...

Ball is dead when the player carrying it goes down in one, and remains live (with other players kicking and committing other acts of violence against the downed player) in the other. Can't remember which is which, but someone I knew who used to play both said it could be really, really bad if you forgot which you were playing . . .

[Heid the Ba]

League has 13 players, the play is stopped briefly after the tackle and a team has six tackles of possesision; Union has 15 players and play only stops when the ball goes out of play or for infringements. In both the ball can only be passed backwards.

I grew up playing Union, have never played League (it is a North of England thing in the UK) and played American Football in my late 20s - early 30s.

Very different games, but with similar levels of violence and injuries.

Of the two rugbys League can be better to watch these days as the latest tinkering with the laws of Union have turned many games into kicking contests.

[MM_Dandy]

Might American footballers wear pads because of more instances of high-velocity impacts? In what little I've seen of rugby, ball carriers don't usually get a lot of space from would-be tacklers, and so neither has as many opportunities to get up to speed. I'm quite ignorant of rugby, though, so perhaps others can say whether or not that is true.

[Heid the Ba]

In rugby you don't get collisions like a WR going over the middle and meeting a safety coming the other way. It is hard to know whether padding is to protect from collisions or what causes them in the first place. My suspicion always was that people threw themselves into things because they were wearing helmets.

I played American Football at a low level so we didn't have big fast guys, most people were one or the other, and some were neither. Most collisions in our game were relatively tame; though we had a death one year from a ruptured liver.