Rugby violence and NFL violence are very different. Rugby players are tough, tough men. As ohmelads said, you have all the eye gouging, biting, stomping, teeth losing, nose crumpling and occasional bone breaking too. But in the NFL, its not just that they are tough men, (which they are, trust me you'd be terrified if you saw them up close.) It's that they have all that inaction followed by a pure head-on car crash collision every half minute. The NFL players are between 250-350 pounds on average, and run lightning fast. There was some rugby expert who said the collisions in rugby are nothing compared to the NFL ones, where they hit each other as if shot out of cannons, he used some statistics to back that up. They are basically human missiles, launching themselves at top speed, with ridiculous amounts of power and leverage at the other player. This leads to some rather gruesome injuries often if they hit each other the wrong way. So yes, while rugby players are extremely tough men who would never back down from a fight, the point of NFL football isn't just to beat each other up or prove you are the tougher man, but rather to quite literally hit the other person so hard that you kill him, or at least absolutely knock him unconscious. That intent, and the ability to do so with every hit, is why the helmets and padding are necessary. Even with the helmets, it is estimated that something like 10-50 percent of HIGH SCHOOL (14-17 year old) football players suffer major concussions, and they are nowhere near as big and violent as the NFL players.
