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> The most impressive athletes in any sport in the world are in the NFL

When I read this I immediately thought this person has never heard of Nadia Comãneci.

Nadia Elena Comăneci (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈnadi.a koməˈnet͡ʃʲ] (About this sound listen); born November 12, 1961) is a Romanian gymnast. An Olympic gold medalist, Comăneci is the first athlete in the history of the sport to be awarded a perfect score of 10.0[1]

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadia_Comăneci

Edited to add: Here is the link to Nadia's 1976 Olympic Games perfect 10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl9QpC8_LiE

"An Olympic gold medalist, Comăneci is the first athlete in the history of the sport to be awarded a perfect score of 10.0"

But then imagine that, in that same olympics, there was a 6'5" tall human, weighing 320 pounds, that scored a 7.

What Nadia did was amazing. What NFL players are doing in the 21st century is otherworldly.

Someone once explained to me that rugby is a contact sport, and American football is an impact sport. The padding allows players to hit each other harder without bruising or direct impact, while the brain still bangs around in the skull.

We have an intuitive understanding of impacts that don't reflect the reality of the risks...

Boxers wear gloves to protect hands, not heads, and those big pillows mean harder hits mean more brain damage. Bareknuckle boxing is better for the brain.

No rugby player is lining up his skull and charging other players skulls like a ram or a goat, that would hurt, so they don't do it. Football players really need less protection for their heads so they stop doing things that are dumb for their brain.

The challenge with football is that the obvious corrections to the game would seem to be quite fan unfriendly... Touch football is hard to imagine on FOX SPORTS.

In the old days they had soft helmets, probably should go back.

Yeah my uncle played rugby for over 30 years with no major injuries when you don't have pads it definitely changes the nature of the game and ironically for the better.

Though Rugby can still break your spine, I think?

Yes, mostly at amateur level. Rugby (union) also has problems with serious injury, and it shouldn't be considered a better, or safer American football. At national level many teams play a very direct style - smash repetedly into the opposition until you create a hole. I think the IRB should make whatever rule changes are neccessary to encourage more running-rugby, and make "the hit" less important.

> the IRB should make whatever rule changes are neccessary to encourage more running-rugby

Turn it into rugby leage?

>What is interesting however is that neither rugby union, league or AFL have anywhere near the level of concussive damage, maybe because the lack of protection leads to a different approach to bodily harm

This is often cited as the cause for the discrepancy, but it doesn't consider the actual rules of each game. Like you said, games like rugby union, league, and AFL are more about fluidity and flexibility than American football. American football is about getting set, lining up, and going at your opponent as fast as you can. The end result is that the number of full speed collisions in American football is much higher since the players are often charging directly at each other. In the other sports the two opposing teams are often moving in the same direction so high impact head on collisions are rarer.

A lot of the head trauma in American football is really just from the brain rattling around in the skull as people collide at full speed. The helmets basically act as air bags in a car crash. They are there to prevent fractured skulls, but they do very little to prevent concussions and other head trauma.

> NFL which I personally think culturally encapsulates an American approach to the world - this is the offence team, this is defence, let’s pad up and beat the shit out of the opposing side. Compared to the other three which display to my way of thinking a fluidity and flexibility that I believe to be more skilful and also a reflection of a deeper cultural flexibility.

Team sports emulate warfare, and determining who wins or loses is based on achieving goals. Thus the strategy and goals adopted by these sports end up reflecting how each society believes how war should be fought and how wars are won. Thus europeans favour sports and strategies which are focused on achieving the goals without any emphasis on unnecessary manhandling or violence (not because of any pseudo superority or morality, but mainly because it needlessly wastes energy, degrades our side's athletic capabilities and performance, and also lowers the value of what is expected to be conquered) while the US favours a scorched-earth approach where winning is confounded with decimating the enemy in a humiliating manner, without any care preserving any value on which is about to be conquered.

This US-centric view of warfare is very well represented in Ender's game.

> I can’t understand let alone (and probably because of my lack of understanding) stand NFL which I personally think culturally encapsulates an American approach to the world - this is the offence team, this is defence, let’s pad up and beat the shit out of the opposing side.

Out of curiosity have you ever watched the NFL? Like, given it a good chance for at least a few games? Because in pop culture that's how the NFL is portrayed and marketed, but it's not really like that and honestly I'd venture to say that's not why most people like watching it - because there's not really much literal "beating the shit" out of the opposing side anyway, and to give an example: if you listen to the live crowds, you rarely, if ever, hear them lose their shit when the occasional gruesome helmet-to-helmet play or injury occurs, as someone on the outside looking in might expect. On the flipside, any time contact is avoided by the home team to make a good play, the crowd collectively loses their shit, because really what football is about is using physical strength as well as skill - mental and physical - to outsmart and outmaneuver your opponent and "beat the shit out of them" that way.

I've been watching football for years and I still barely understand how, at its core, the game works. Nevermind how physically skilled they are, which is a given - there is so much that goes into the game mentally it's mindboggling. Don't even get me started on the quarterback position which is arguably the most mentally-intensive position in any of the major sports, not just because it requires intelligence but it requires intelligence, FAST, while a bunch of guys are clawing at your offensive line trying to run into you and bring you down for the sack.

I’ve watched a handful, particularly when I was living (studying) in the states, and no doubt it is a game of strategy, and no doubt I don’t understand it well (as I mentioned). I hesitate with your strong endorsement of the intensive mental stress of it however, particularly when compared to the sports I mentioned, particularly Union, which lacks the long pauses and set pieces of NFL and requires more dynamic and on-the-fly thinking without coach or other input. I’m not saying it’s less than, but to use an analogy, I think for example Union is like the US Marine Corps (browsing their wiki article last night) where the outcome is the goal with the methods to be determined by the players, whereas NFL seems to be a continual discussion of strategy and set plays with sideline input, something not overly possible in union

>>That’s a highly cultural-specific viewpoint.

What is? That the NFL has the best athletes in the world?

If the NFL athletes trained for a year to do anything else, or you put all the athletes in the world into a decathalon of power/speed/strength specific events, it would be an insane blowout.

NFL players would crush every other group of athletes individually and probably combined, and I say this as someone who has worked with Rugby Union and AFL players in Australia. There is no comparison, they are the best athletes in the world for any fair value of athletics you want to use.

How about a literal decathlon?

But come on, there are tremendous differences difference between the body types and skills involved in swimming, gymnastics, bobsled, trick snowboarding, 100 meter dash, marathon, boxing, sumo, table tennis, basketball, archery, rock climbing, ballet, ... https://imgur.com/a/cOTTF

You can’t just say “these particular athletes matching a particular archetype are ‘the best’, and could be retrained to beat anyone at anything”.

Their horsemanship is, by and large, terrible.

"Best athlete" is a function of the event, where physical strength, speed, and agility alone do not guarantee success. Doesn't matter how much time you give to NFL players, they wouldn't outplay Giannis Antetokounmpo or LeBron James, or out-race Eliud Kipchoge, or out-dribble Messi, or out-swim Olympic swimmers, or out-climb Alex Honnold, etc. Those are all fair measures of athletic ability.

Your argument might be more reasonable if you were trying to compare top NFL athletes to somebody like Ashton Eaton (world decathlon record holder).

Are you saying that almost all of the best athletes in the world just happen to be born in America? Or are you claiming that the NFL training regime is so good that it allows them to beat everyone else in the world? Why would that be? It can't be the money. There's a lot more money in soccer, and unlike NFL it has a pool of talent that covers the whole world.

And no salary caps, and no closed-shop leagues.