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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.