...football?

About 2000 kilometres

They are both played by mad men so not much

Football they wear pads (pansies)
Rugby is a cool and viscious game

your a waste of my air never compare the US to foreigners this is america

alot .
in rugby you can only pass the ball backwards , the only way to score points is scoring a try at the end of the pitch or getting the ball between the posts, there is no major padding, you can only tackle the person with the ball , there are offside rules that count depending on where the ball is and the play continues constantly except for the referee stopping it for a foul or penalty. plus theres alot of other rules.

The similarities are easier, insofar as they both use oval shaped balls and the idea is to cross the opposition goal line to score. Outside that, there is not so much in common apart from the fact that I like watching both.

Woman Beater, you are funny. What has Rugby got to do with foreigners. It is widely played throughout America and the USA is even the reigning Olympic champions when it was last played in them over 50 years ago. America is quick to call their sports champions 'World Champions', even when at best many of their competitions only have Canadian teams as well as US teams, so I wouldn't be so quick to rattle off isolationist rhetoric, especially when your country is begging the rest of the world to help out in Afghanistan.

Rugby's played differently than football, although the general concept is the same. You get points for touchdowns (which are called tries) and field goals, just like football. The mechanics are a little different.

I'm assuming everyone knows football so I won't bother explaining that.

In rugby, the game starts with a kick off, that is drop-kicked (the ball must touch the ground before being kicked) from the 50 meter line (basically the 50 yard line). The team that receives catches the ball and tries to advance it, until they are tackled. In rugby, when a defensive player tackles another player, he must actually wrap up the player, otherwise the offensive man with the ball can just get up and keep on running. When a player is tackled correctly, he must release the ball. This leaves it available for both teams to take. This is why you see a large group of people around the ball when someone is tackled.

The ball can either be passed backwards or kicked. Unlike in football, rugby players have to option to kick offensively or defensively. A player can kick the ball and retrieve it after he has run by defenders, and so on.

When the ball goes out of bounds, there is a lineout. A lineout is essentially a soccer-style throw in, where both teams line up where the ball went out of bounds. Teams often lift players up to get a height advantage over the other team. The scrum occurs when play has stopped and needs to resume, usually after a minor infraction. In the scrum, the biggest players on each team huddle together and a the scrumhalf (a position) rolls the ball into the middle, allowing both teams to have fair contest for the ball. A team wins the scrum by hooking it back and working the ball to the back player in the scrum.

Tries (touchdowns) are worth 5 points, and the ball must be physically put down in the try zone. Afterward there is a conversion kick, which is worth 2 points. The kick must be taken in a straight line from where the ball was placed.

That's enough to get you started and to know what is going on in a rugby game, although I am leaving a few things out.

Well in addition to the one or two articles above which actually tell you something useful ("nillawiz" has it about right), rather than just flaunt their ignorance, Wikipedia has an article which actually compares the two sports. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...nd_rugby_union

Its actually pretty good.