Here’s a conversation I got into in a pub recently — how good would Barry Sanders have been if he had played rugby?
I think this only makes sense if you picture an alternate universe where Walter Camp didn’t exist to create the gridiron, and American colleges just decided to adopt the Rugby Football Union laws for college football. Still, try to imagine Sanders on a rugby backline, taking the ball, making a few tacklers miss and zooming up the field faster than everyone else. Nobody had the combination of quickness and elusiveness quite like Sanders.
My own feeling is that a guy like Earl Campbell would have been much more suited to the game of rugby, because he was so damn hard to tackle. He would just barrel into you like a mack truck hitting a deer. That style seems more suited to rugby, really. A boy in Europe with Sanders’ athletic ability might have been funneled into Association Football instead.
What do you think? Post your thoughts in the comments.
11 responses so far ↓
1 Tony // Jun 18, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Barry probably could have been the next Pele. I think he even looks like him… maybe
2 Alan // Jun 19, 2007 at 5:08 am
I think if you take any good running back from the past 20 years, and they would have been good at rugby in some capactiy had they done the training. Rugby has a spot for any running style, you have backs that can make people miss and you have your forwards that can barrel through the line.
This is why rugby in the USA needs to make a good effort to start introducing the game to a younger audience and developing skills. We have the population base to take rugby by storm, but the limited exposure of the game prevents it. Just think if there was a Sanders-esque back that decided he’d take his chances playing rugby than football. He’d be wearing an USA Eagles jersey in good time.
Of course, given the Lions o-lines when Barry played, you might say he played rugby every Sunday…(no obstruction from Detroit)
3 Dave // Jun 19, 2007 at 8:06 am
Alan: I think that was the point of the guy in the bar. Barry Sanders never really had good blockers, yet he still dodged everyone coming after him. This might be useful in rugby, where blocking is a penalty.
4 a different dave // Jun 21, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Dave,
It might interest you to know, on the West Coast, at least in California, rugby was the main football code at American universities and colleges in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They didn’t switch to gridiron until some time after WWI.
My alma mater, University of California, Berkeley, is a rugby union powerhouse in the USA (recently beat BYU for the college championship, IIRC, 37-7) and has been since the 1880′s, when the university was formed and started playing rugby. The “big game” between Cal and Stanford was originally a rugby game, not a gridiron game.
This is one reason why the USA did so well in Olympic rugby, back when there was such a thing, and why we are still reigning Olympic gold medal rugby champions. We used to play rugby seriously, in California at least, and back in the 1920′s, gridiron was still pretty similar in many ways to rugby and it was not hard to convert a gridiron player to a rugby player. For one thing, back then gridiron players played the entire game, both on offense and on defense. And the forward pass was still in its infancy. And gridiron helmets and padding were still rudimentary.
Nowadays of course you can’t really convert a gridiron player to rugby that easily. The games are too different now. Previous poster is correct, we need to get lots of young people into rugby early, so they can learn the proper tactics at the youth level. Most rugby players in the USA don’t discover rugby until they get to college or university, ie, at age 18, and that is far too late to develop a world class rugby player. This is why the USA Eagles, although they can usually qualify for the IRB World Cup, never make it out of the group stage.
If California had stuck to its guns and stuck with rugby, we might have a situation where we have two popular football codes in the USA (rugby union and gridiron) based on region, much like the Aussie rules vs. rugby league split in Australia. We’d have a much stronger USA Eagles national team today, if that had happened.
Interestingly, the NFL/NCAA football historians seem to have pushed California rugby down the Orwellian memory hole, just like they did soccer.
5 a different dave // Jun 21, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Hmmm… I might have been a bit too sweeping in my previous post, I had assumed rugby was played continuously at Cal until the early 20th century but this bit on wiki says otherwise:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Golden_Bears#Rugby_Union
***Rugby Union
Cal Rugby’s home is at 5000-seat Witter Rugby Field, located near California Memorial Stadium in Strawberry Canyon. The Golden Bears are the reigning collegiate national champion, which (as Cal’s 23 total championships can attest to) is a situation that has become very familiar in Berkeley.
[edit] History
Rugby union began play at Cal in 1882 and continued until 1886, when it was ditched in favor of American Football. Rugby would make a return in 1906 after football was deemed too dangerous to play. From 1906 to 1914, Cal rugby garnered a respectable 78-21-10 record. 1914, however, saw the return of football and Cal would not field a rugby team for almost 20 years. In 1931, rugby returned under alumnus Ed Graff. It was during this time that Cal began to compete for the World Cup, which is awarded to the winner of the annual series between Cal and the University of British Columbia.
1938 began the era of Miles “Doc” Hudson, who guided the Bears for 37 years and an incredible record of 339-84-23. His successor would be Ned Anderson, an alumnus and former rugger for the Bears.
National collegiate championships for rugby union began in 1980 and Cal has been utterly dominant, winning 23 titles out of a possible 28.[3] Under Anderson, Cal reeled off four consecutive titles from 1980 to 1983. Current head coach and Cal alumnus Jack Clark took over the team in 1984, and has achieved even more prolonged success, leading the Bears to 19 national titles including a string of 12 consecutive championships from 1991 to 2002.
Clark’s team recently captured the 2007 collegiate title.***
6 a different dave // Jun 21, 2007 at 3:29 pm
This is what I get for jumping to conclusions. Apparently the Big Game began after Cal had switched from rugby to gridiron:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Game_(football)
***The Big Game is the annual football game between Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley (known simply as “Cal”), held in November. The first Big Game was held in March 19, 1892 on San Francisco’s Haight Street grounds when Stanford beat Cal 14-10. It is the tenth longest rivalry in NCAA Division 1A football. Through 2006, Stanford leads the series record at 54-44-11 (wins-losses-ties; 49-41-10, if rugby games from 1906 to 1914 are excluded). ***
7 a different dave // Jun 21, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Interesting article on rugby history in California:
http://www.pacificcoastrugby.com/template.php?sid=10
8 a different dave // Jun 21, 2007 at 3:40 pm
And of course the inevitable wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugby_union_in_the_United_States#1870-1960
9 a different dave // Jun 21, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Olympic rugby; apparently it was a French rugby riot that probably caused the removal of rugby from the Olympics:
http://www.rugbymag.com/archive/2004/march/history.htm
10 Jeff V // Mar 27, 2008 at 10:02 am
Who from the NFL do you think would be the best Rugby player?
I say Kordell Stewart, he was athletic, smart and even had a decent boot.
I think Slash could have become one of the elite Fullbacks.
11 Dave // Mar 27, 2008 at 10:06 am
I’m not so sure about “smart,” Jeff, but yeah, Slash might have made a good rugger bugger. I think you’ll find a lot of good NFL running backs and tight ends would have done well in rugby, though, if they had the training for it.