AHC: Make rugby as popular in the United States as in the rest of the Anglosphere

Salem_Saberhagen

Salem_Saberhagen

I've always wondered why rugby isn't a popular sport in the United States, when it has insane popularity in the UK and the Anglosphere (Australia, NZ, South Africa, Canada to a lesser extent), and even in several non-English-speaking countries influenced by Britain like Argentina or Japan.

What POD can you use to make rugby a mainstay American sport? How can we make the Rugby World Cup as big as the Superbowl?
 

Dathi THorfinnsson

The 'Montreal rules' that the Ivy league adopted that evolved into modern US Gridiron WAS a rules variant of Rugby.

Just have more connexion across the Atlantic on Rugby rules, et voila.

===
Note that Canada (see 'Montreal rules', above), despite being a British colony at the time, was the offender in terms of moving away from British rules and heading the game in towards being a different sport.
 

Byzantion

Salem_Saberhagen said:
I've always wondered why rugby isn't a popular sport in the United States, when it has insane popularity in the UK and the Anglosphere (Australia, NZ, South Africa, Canada to a lesser extent), and even in several non-English-speaking countries influenced by Britain like Argentina or Japan.

What POD can you use to make rugby a mainstay American sport? How can we make the Rugby World Cup as big as the Superbowl?
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Soccer is extremly popular in the US, how could Rugby be more successful ?
 

Milo

Byzantion said:
Soccer is extremly popular in the US, how could Rugby be more successful ?
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Teddy Roosevelt decides to puah for adaption of Rugby instead of Football which seems incapable of reform after countless deaths and industry. Many tops Colleges such as HArvard and Princeton begin playing Rugby and sport gradually grows and indeed spurted on by visiting Commonwealth teams. College teams although the spread of the game until Rugby is nations pastime
 

SactoMan101

Gawd, imagine if the Americans evolved "football" into using Rugby Union rules. Given the strength, speed and size of American football players today, American rugby union football--had it developed from the early 1900's--would dominate Rugby Union, with the only possible competition being the New Zealand All-Blacks with its players of Maori descent.
 

Masked Grizzly

SactoMan101 said:
Gawd, imagine if the Americans evolved "football" into using Rugby Union rules. Given the strength, speed and size of American football players today, American rugby union football--had it developed from the early 1900's--would dominate Rugby Union, with the only possible competition being the New Zealand All-Blacks with its players of Maori descent.
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The ATL rivalry between the US rugby team and the All-Blacks or Wallabies would also add some context to OTL Hollywood's (and US popular culture's) at times rather forced portrayal of stereotypical Australian and New Zealand villains.
 

Scotty

SactoMan101 said:
Gawd, imagine if the Americans evolved "football" into using Rugby Union rules. Given the strength, speed and size of American football players today, American rugby union football--had it developed from the early 1900's--would dominate Rugby Union, with the only possible competition being the New Zealand All-Blacks with its players of Maori descent.
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I'm not sure you can compare the size of NFL players to rugby players

NFL is a succession of short, sharp plays (which are essentially static straight up/down for the 'big lads') whilst rugby is'nt.

If we had seen the US evolve into Rugby then i think the big lads would be 20-30 pounds lighter than they currently are, which puts them right in the ballpark for 2nd rows, flankers, no8's

running backs / wingers are already broadly comparable (assuming we ignore obvious outliers) in that they're mostly in the range of 6' - 6'2" (200-215 pounds)

the US would be massivley successful, but that would be to do with the depth of the talent pool, and the shedloads of cash that the game would generate
 

JennyB

American football evolved out of Rugby. About ten years later, the latter sport split into Rugby Union and Rugby League. Rugby League took on many of the characteristics of gridiron, such as eliminating the scrum in favour of the snap, but is a much less specialised game. Perhaps if gridiron had not introduced the forward pass the two sports might have merged.
 
Driftless

Driftless

Donor
An early true World Series/World Cup, with some high level "smack-talk" by national leaders resonating with the average US fan. "We're 'Murican's, we'll show those dirty @#%$ SOB's"
 
Fletch

Fletch

You would need an acceptance of amateurism in twentieth century America for Union to catch on, which I don't think would happen. There is a chance of League catching on though.
 
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