Good points all. As a former rugby player, I believe that the players should have reduced padding and no helmets. I don’t like seeing a 300 lb. lineman driving a smaller player into the ground with all the force he can muster. The object of such an act is to injure a player; nothing else.
Case in point: When UCLA’s Anthony Barr sacked USC’s Matt Barkley, he drove him to the ground with all his body weight. Sacking him wasn’t enough, was it?
But, that’s what sells tickets.
Basketball has gotten crazy. I wonder when they are going to put a cage around the courts?
For the NFL to work in that fashion, they would have to ban high and low tackling, as they do in rugby. I don't see that happening, especially as long as they allow blocking.
As you know, one of the reasons rugby works like it does is that there's no blocking, with the sole exceptions I can think of being in a scrum or maul, and there's a penalty for collapsing the scrum. The impacts in rugby, while often forceful, are almost always chest-to-chest or shoulder-to-chest and you don't see the kinds of open-field hits you see in the NFL.