Super Bowl 58 was a test of might between a team that had already seen seven Super Bowls and a team that’s going to win the next seven Super Bowls. It was the Goliath vs. Goliath story that Americans crave.
But it’s over now. If you’re looking for more sports, the Australian “National Rugby League” is starting their next season in Las Vegas. Why the NRL is sending their players to our desert to get horrible jet-lag, I don’t know. But last year’s Grand Final was everything you’d want from a sporting event. They were done in an hour and a half. It was close to the very end. One guy scored three times in ten minutes and his team still lost.
I watched the game with my friend in a Sydney bar.[1] I didn’t even know there were two kinds of rugby—this video is about league, not union—so we spent the first half deriving the rules from what we know about American football. We appreciated the differences; rugby feels a lot more fast-paced and brutal. The football clock is 20 minutes shorter, but it takes twice as much real time as a rugby game. The Lions–Niners game, for example, lasted about three and a half weeks. Rugby players don’t wear padding, so you watch skin and bone crash together in ways some viewers may find disturbing. Beyond these superficial things, I noticed two differences in the rules that drastically change the pacing and strategy of these games.
In both sports, the team with the ball wants to move it to the other end of the field. In football, you go to the “end zone” for a six-point “touchdown;” in rugby, you go to the “in-goal” for a four-point “try.”[2] Both sports let you try a kick for extra points. The other team does not want the ball to move forward, and they are ready to enact violence on their fellow man to stop this.
In rugby, the team gets six chances, or “tackles,” to get the ball to the in-goal area. When the player holding the ball gets tackled, the referee acknowledges the tackle, the players get up, and play restarts immediately. After six tackles, the ball goes to the other team.
In football, the team gets four chances, or “downs,” to move the ball forward at least ten yards. When the player holding the ball gets tackled, you get to watch a commercial for painkillers. Every player, no matter where they are, must respond to the call of duty along the “line of scrimmage,” wherever the last guy got tackled. This can take up to forty seconds. If the team can’t advance the ball after fourth down, it goes to the other team.
All this resetting between plays makes football so much slower. Why do we waste so much time making our players get into formation?
In football, the possessing team gets one forward pass per play. It might not sound like a lot, but this is how you get the highly-paid quarterback who must not be damaged. He throws the ball upfield to one of at most five receivers. Since so many people can catch the ball, the other team needs to spread out along the line of scrimmage to stop all those people from advancing.
In rugby, forward passes are illegal. You can only throw the ball beside or behind you. This results in a Cascade of Men where every defending player on planet Earth chases the one poor bastard with the ball. It’s honestly a bit terrifying, and it’s a miracle that anyone finds an opening wide enough to score through.
There are a million other differences between the two sports, but whether the players have to reset after the ball hits the ground and whether the ball can be passed forward really change how these two games look and feel.
Sources are a bit light here because this isn't a big serious video essay.
None (so far).