I recognize this is anecdata, but the first concussion I got was playing Rugby - the first day I went out - not all the years I spent playing American Football up to that point. American Football is a far more controlled game, and the bodies are spread out over more of the field. I believe both of these points are important differences to understand injury risk. With Rugby, the pace is non-stop and the bodies are massed closer together. The lack of protective gear is also a factor.

In terms of perception - American Football is simply better known. I bet if you stood on a street corner and asked 50 people to tell you something about Rugby, they would describe it as soccer but you get to carry the ball.

>they would describe it as soccer but you get to carry the ball.

that's an interesting bet/theory. i would never have expected that as a description. like, even after hearing the description, i can't imagine how it could have come to be.

I think I have about an average knowledge of Rugby for an American. So, not much.

My attempt at a succinct explanation would be “football (American) but they start plays all bunched up instead of in lines”.

I’m sure it’s very wrong.

Cricket would be “baseball, but the home plate umpire is made of sticks”.

which is a succinct example of why "X like Y, but different" type of descriptions are horrible. the "Uber of ______" type of elevator pitches are just so lame and uninspired, really benefit no one.

Are you suggesting that in baseball pitchers actually aim to hit the "home plate umpire"?

No, but their main (but not only!) activity is judging balls and strikes (whether a pitch that was not hit passed through an imaginary rectangle defined by the height of the batter’s knees and armpits, and the sides of home plate) and in Cricket the pitcher (?) wants to hit the wicket (?) such that you don’t need to judge that (the sticks do, by getting knocked over, or not getting knocked over)

Fair enough, hadn't thought of it that way. Though of course cricket has a stumps (bowler's end) umpire too, who has to judge if the delivery is legal (i.e. it must not be "thrown" and the bowler's foot must be behind the line etc. And if the ball is too wide the batting team gets a "free" run etc.), and whether a catch taken by the keeper was off the bat, or if the batter used their legs to prevent the ball hitting the stumps etc etc.

Some cricket match that was on at the pub when I was visiting New Zealand had me mesmerized on the level of "judging". In baseball, there's the checked swing to consider in being considered a strike. In cricket, they have mics and listen for the strike to judge. There were other similar things that just revealed why a cricket test can last for days, and made me wish for the "speed" of a baseball game.

>in Cricket the pitcher (?)

in Cricket, the Bowler

There we go. Thank you.

I usually learn rules and terminology to sports I’ve played little or not at all, by playing sports video games. I’ve yet to find ones for rugby or cricket that I liked, so continue to barely understand them.

FWIW in Australia we have reasonable exposure to baseball (and/or softball and even "rounders", both of which we got to play at school a few times), so much of the terminology and the basic rules are well enough known. I wouldn't say the same for gridiron though, which I've never seen played here at all. Do you even see people playing cricket anywhere in the US? Surely in areas with large subcontinental populations (SV?) there'd be some uptake?

> Do you even see people playing cricket anywhere in the US

It’s not impossible to find, and exactly where you’d expect: the closer you are to a major population center, and the larger & more internationally-prestigious the nearest university, the more like you are to see it in the wild.

But over most of the US, yeah, you could easily go your whole life and never even see a cricket bat in person, let alone a match being played.

Rugby seems to be a significantly more popular than cricket, though still uncommon, considered over the whole geography of the country.

Maybe because rugby is a flowing game like soccer, minutes of play before a referee blows the whistle. Football is stop and go, only a few seconds before a play is over, by design. It's paced like baseball. Rugby and soccer are like basketball. Volleyball is somewhere in between.

Yes - that's exactly what I had in mind when I made that suggestion.

Is rugby more brutal? More kinetic, I easily agree with. Reading the data, it seems that concussions are indeed higher in rugby, such that that should be concerning.

That said, the specialization allowed by American Football results in some people that can hit far harder than should be encouraged. Especially true in youth sports, in my mind, as growth just isn't even by age for people. At least in professional leagues you can somewhat control for that.

I subscribe to the perspective that brain injuries are the injuries that matter most in sports, so that's what I focus on in the "what's more dangerous" question.

I had believed that rugby carried a lower concussion risk because of the lack of padding/helmets changed player behavior, but it looks like that's not the case.

This[1] is one of the best analysis/discussions I found.

It references this[2] 2021 meta-analysis as the most expansive.

A few key quotes:

> This meta-analysis demonstrated rugby has the highest concussion risk, followed by American Football, ice hockey, and wrestling.

> Meanwhile, a 2015 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine looked at 13 articles that addressed sports concussion rates. It found that rugby placed first, with a rate more than three times higher than ice hockey and eight times higher than American football.

> One paper, published in 2016 in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, looked at NCAA Division I injuries over three seasons for both sports. The authors found that the overall injury rate was about three times higher in rugby than in American football, and that a subset of this, the concussion rate, was about 2.5 times higher in rugby than in football. The authors deemed these differences to represent a "substantially higher" risk for rugby.

TL;DR: Rugby's probably the most dangerous for concussions and overall injury of any major team sport.

[1] https://www.wral.com/story/fact-check-biden-says-football-is...

[2] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23776916-concussion-...

Awesome links! I'll try to dive on both, a little at least. I think it is safe to say both sports should continue to get the attention they are getting with regards to safety. Hopefully they follow up on that more.

I'm curious on how the data works by position. Thinking on it for a moment, I'd expect risk of injury for most positions in American Football is low. Such that, for the entire sport, this data actually does make a lot of sense. However, it is also easy to see that positions like quarterback are far more likely to get certain kinds of injuries. To the credit of the league, many of the more severe injuries that we saw years ago would be illegal hits in today's game.

Again, this data does make sense. And I think it is safe to say that rugby is almost certainly more dangerous.

I also used to ascribe to the belief that rugby had fewer concussions (as a collegiate/semi-pro rugby player) but I wasn't aware of these data, thanks for sharing.

In retrospect, it makes sense to me. I think the nature of rugby collisions and how you play the game just lends itself to more concussions than American football. A lot of AF is throwing passes which get broken up by less violent hits versus in rugby the only way is to tackle the guy carrying the ball.

At the professional level Brian injuries are the most important, but most pro athletes are often absolutely wrecking their body.

However, at the level of high school students concussions are significant but joint injuries are more likely to be life altering. Of course that’s less impactful per person than death, TBI, spinal injuries, etc but you also see that stuff from people driving to and from less dangerous sports so there’s many ways to slice this stuff.

Consider vastly more football players people have died getting to the event than at the event. So arguably the biggest way to make these sports safer is to ban players traveling long distances to events.

And there is Australian Rule too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepherding_(Australian_rules_...

No idea about severity or frequency of incidents but the (very few) matches I happened to watch were far more "physical" than rugby.

Is there a looming CTE crisis for rugby, or is it already a significant issue?

CTE is looming over any athlete of a contact sport. This lawsuit might be a crisis:

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/nfl-style-lawsuit-br...

However, when you consider the NFL, which had a similar lawsuit, it is making more money than ever and not having trouble recruiting people to play, so I dunno. The sport itself will likely be OK.

As an aside, this article features Chris Nowinski, who is a leader in this field. If this topic interests you, you might enjoy reading his book Head Games or following him on socials.

Thanks, I was genuinely curious to see any answers.

The problem with these studies is that they gather their stats from doctors. I have no idea about Rugby, but American football has a very real culture of hiding concussions at all costs. If the only statistics they're using are from team doctors, they are GROSSLY underestimating the number of concussions in an average football season.

There's a belief that the average lineman is suffering some form of brain damage on pretty much every down they're in the game.

https://www.thebiglead.com/posts/linemen-are-more-prone-to-c...

I remember reading a study that showed women's soccer was actually the highest concussion risk of any sport. It's been a few years but it stood out to me at the time.

Isn't it just artefact of American Football being culturally important in America while Rugby is simply not? Americans watch American Football and their kids play it. Rugby is a niche sport, people just do not think about it.

There's a saying "Rugby is a thug sport played by gentlemen where Football is a gentleman's sport played by thugs"

I always kind of thought American Football effectively suffers from the SUV problem: once someone is in huge armour, everyone else has to be as well.

Is there something fundamentally different with rugby that they don’t need nearly as much equipment?

The big difference is the continuous nature of the game- rather than a serious of short plays, there are two 40-minute halves, during which the ball is in play, and in motion, continuously until it either leaves the field (whether by someone scoring or via a touchline) or a rule is broken that requires the ball to be given to the other team. There are also very limited tactical substitutions, in contrast to American football's platoon system where specialist offensive and defensive teams alternate being on the field.

This means that a rugby player must be able to keep running for the whole match, so they can't be as big as the biggest NFL players. For example the heaviest player on the England rugby team, prop Will Stuart, weighs in at 291 lb (most of his teammates, even those who play the same position, are significantly lighter). Every single offensive lineman on the current Chiefs roster, plus several players in other positions, is heavier than him.

Another effect of the stop-start nature of American football, and in particular the system of downs, is that small differences in how far the ball advances are often very important, and are more important than actually bringing the ball carrier down. In American football, a tackle is a head-on collision between the ball carrier and (often) several defensive players, with the aim of immediately stopping the forward progress of the ball. A rugby tackle is usually one player, often from behind, wrapping his arms around the ball carrier's legs to bring him down, at which point he has to give up the ball but play continues. It's designed to bring him down as efficiently as possible (because play won't stop), while leaving the tackler's teammates free to tackle whoever receives the ball if the ball carrier can get rid of it.

> Futból (in Spanish to distinguish it)

Or in English you can distinguish it as "Association Football", which abbreviates to "soccer" by dropping the leading vowel and the suffix from "association", and then tacking on the customary English rhotic ending.

"Just as bad"? Soccer fans are the worst.

Exactly. Football today is the safest its ever been, especially at the high school level.

There is no sport on earth that brings in more diverse people in terms of body types, sizes, races and forces them to work together to achieve their goals. You can't be selfish in football or the team suffers.

Whether you're a huge offensive lineman protecting the skinnier and more studious quarterback, a tall and fast wide receiver, a short / quick running back, any type of defender or one of the multiple kicking positions...there is a place for you on the team. The team that in college can be up to 120 players who train together, study together and support each other to succeed.

There's no sport that brings people and communities together better than football, because it's the most inclusive sport out there.