I don’t know! It’s so much more fun to watch. Games are shorter, action, the silly scrimmage. It seems perfectly geared to our short attention span.

I think that one of reasons gridiron football got so popular in the first place is because of its unique pacing.

A play starts, a few specific actions take place over the course of like, 5-15 seconds usually, then play stops while they set up. This might sound terrible to some people, but this means that there’s space in-between plays for people to talk. Could be talking about what just happened, or trying to predict what will happen next, or about how this fits within the greater context of the game or season. Or it could be talking about the beer or the nachos or whatever else. It makes the games more of a social event.

With the rise of television, this means advertising space and color commentary. Advertising = money, which fuels the entire industry.

This is also why baseball is “America’s favorite past time”. Golf is up there too, and I would even argue that oval track racing in NASCAR kind of follows this trend, because most of the interesting action tends to take place around pit stops (or at least it did when I used to watch it). Its not 100%- basketball and hockey are still popular.

I feel like rugby is what football claims to be. It’s way more fun to watch (personal opinion).

Early versions of rugby and association football were already being played in the United States. Then in the late 19th and early 20th centuries people started making changes to the sports being played to make them faster, more exciting, more organized, more consistent (different schools played using different rules) and safer*. Most notable were the changes made by Walter Camp around 1880 that established many of the recognizable facets of today’s game like of scrimmage, the snap, and down-and- distance rules. His main motivation was to change the game from what he viewed as a mob dominated by strength into a game of speed and finesse.

By the time rugby was also being standardized, American football had established its popularity here and cultural momentum took it the rest of the way. It became very popular in college in the first half of the 20th century and very popular professionally in the second half of the century.

*And if you think the sport is dangerous now, just look at the early 1900s. The federal government had to threaten football leagues to make rule changes for safety or be shut down as athletes were dying from injury frequently.

I feel like it’s starting to grow in popularity in the US, but slowly.

Major League Rugby (MLR) was just formed about 7 years ago. The Chicago Hounds won the championship game a couple weeks ago to cap off a dominant, undefeated season. (1st men’s professional team in the US to go undefeated and win the championship since the 1972 Miami Dolphins). The full game is available on YT.

National Collegiate Rugby (NCR) has been growing and organizing as more schools’ rugby programs move from a “club” sport to a varsity sport.

In my city the number of HS rugby teams is growing as well.

The US is hosting the Men’s Rugby World Cup in 2031, and the Women’s Rugby World Cup in 2032.

It depends what you mean by basically. At a very basic level they are both sports where players try to carry a large ball over a line, and the other team tries to tackle them. Beyond that the similarities quickly end.

Rugby is played continuously, play doesn’t stop for tackles and the team on the pitch remains there for the entire game (barring a few 1 time substitutions). Rugby players are expected to transition from offence to defence and back as the game ebbs and flows, and be fit enough to remain caught up with the play most of the game.

The emphasis in rugby is on retaining possession of the ball through subsequent plays and tackles (phases) until such time as you can exploit an opponent’s defence to score.

The emphasis of football is to get the ball 10 yards in 4 plays. And the way the game is structured all the players are expected to be far more specialized into niche roles, and coordinating a lot of specialized skills into short, highly intense bursts of effort. Nobody in football is expected to operate for more than about 5-10 seconds at a time.

As for why one caught on and the other didn’t. It probably doesn’t actually have a huge amount to do with the rulebook of either game, or the similarities or differences therein, beyond the fact that there’s probably only a niche for one major big-guy-tackle-people-move-ball type sport in any given place and time

If they were actually as similar as you think they are you would see more rugby players playing football because of the drastic difference in pay. There have been a couple rugby converts who made the nfl but most dont make it off the practice squad. The game play in the very limited exposure ive had to rugby seems more like soccer like than football.

The college in my town has a rugby team, but no football team.

I played in college
💡!