I was under the impression that teams could make contract offers to the international pipeline players at any time and I thought I read that an unnamed team had made him an offer. Did I hallucinate that? I didn’t think this was a draft thing.
I played rugby throughout college (after dropping out of football) and I love the sport. We played against Penn state, air force and Virginia, which were all top teams back then. We mostly got murdered by big teams but it was still great fun.
The one thing though is tackling is just very different. You can and do take some big hits but rarely with the kind of violent abandon you get with American football. Rugby kinda has the hockey rule. If you really lay someone out it’s absolutely going to come back to you. There being no pads/ helmets plus the hockey rule means the hits by and large are just not nearly as severe.
I’m sure people including his dad have clued him in to this but until he starts taking American football hits from the Garretts, bosas and von millers of the league no one really knows what he is. Every other receiver & runner in the league has come up taking lots of shots. He’s probably had very few.
The flip side is for a big guy he’ll have a ton of stamina. I was never as tired after football games as after rugby games, no close. You’re just running, jumping, scrumming and just moving way more non stop. You get very fit, just cut out of mahogany. He’ll continue to have wheels late in games.
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