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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2851 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 18, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Rugby is no better than foodball in the CTE department. Sure, it's a yellow (or red) to initiate contact with the head, but there are plenty of head injuries that occur through the physical nature of the game by no fault of the players. You can't watch a game without (at least) a player getting sent off for an HIA.

Huh, TIL. I wonder why there hasn't been such a backlash in the Rugby-playing countries as there has been against American Football.

There has. It was a big deal in the British news when a former rugby player (Rob Burrows) died of MND which was probably caused by head injuries. But rugby isn’t as widely followed in Britain as football is in the US, the English invented too many sports for any other than soccer to have the outsized prominence of (American) football in US society.

Having played both at a reasonably-high level I think NFL's considerably worse (atleast as a lineman). Biggest hits I ever took were getting pull blocked as a defensive lineman, and it's just a constant onslaught of ramming your head into eachother.

Yeah, I'd agree that linemen are certainly getting the short end of the stick. The only mitigation is that they only start a foot apart so they're not slamming into each other at full speed. For everyone else it's probably comparable. But both rugby and football are on another level compared to light-contact sports like soccer.

A lineman generates a lot of force inside that foot, and do it again and again and again and again. I'd be shocked if the vast majority of head trauma in the NFL didn't take place during blocking as opposed to tackles, if only since the average play will have what 2 or 3 players involved in 'tackling/being tackled' and like 15 players blocking/being blocked.

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