American football and rugby?

So I've been doing a lot of research about American football and it's origins from rugby and association football but I can't seem to find anywhere how the origins of wearing padding came in and why they wear protective padding in American Football and not in Rugby, they are both physical full on contact sports, does anyone know why protective padding was introduced into American football, links or articles I can read, thank you|||Because the American version of football is so violent with gang tackles and tackles where two people are running full speed at one another that people were getting killed at an alarming rate. In 1905 alone 18 players were killed and 149 others seriously injured (only about 4000 people were playing organized football at the time). In an effort to keep the sport from being banned outright, the President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, convened a panel of coaches and administrators from colleges to come up with rules to keep the game safer. This lead to the formation of the NCAA.





Padding started being worn about 1910 and, as technology and sports science has developed, it has been improved upon. Different pieces were made mandatory in different years. Required padding includes the helmet, shoulder pads, tailbone pads, thigh pads, and knee pads.|||The reason they wear padding in American Football is because of the different tackling style to Rugby. In Rugby Union a tackle is more of a grappling wrestle to the ground requiring a lot of strength but very little impact.





In American football a tackle involves a 250lb man running full speed (usually with a long run up) and colliding head first into another man. It's all about high impact and explosive hitting, so the helmet and extra padding (they wear body pads in Rugby too) are needed. Also you need to take into account the fact that the average NFL player is bigger (6'8 360lbs), stronger (Larry Allen benches 900lbs) and faster (Chris Johnson runs a 10.1 over 100m) then the average Rugby player.





It is because of the very different styles that America needed to add the extra protection because players were literally dying on the field and still today x-players drop dead at a young age because of the the head injuries they suffered in their playing days. I will let you in on a little secret....the helmet actually causes more injuries then it prevents!! The helmet only protects you from skull fracture not impact. A concussion is just as likely to occur with or without a helmet because it is caused by impact to the head smashing your brain against the inside of your skull....you can be wearing 10 helmets but if your head is hit and jolted you will still suffer a concussion!!|||Because of the forward pass (not allowed in rugby) and a line of scrimmage that divides the offense and the defense, there are a lot more head on collisions in American football than in rugby. These head on collisions result in more high energy collisions than rugby tackles, and therefore more serious injuries.|||You might want to check out the Wikipedia article on the history of American football ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_鈥?/a> ), not because the information you want is necessarily there, but for the list of sources the authors use. It seems pretty well researched.|||Because other countries are more poor than the US, and cant afford pads. Thats the main reason, and the British/English pride themselves for not wearing pads because they think that it makes you "tougher", when it ends up and gets you hurt.





EDIT: Guess im wrong LOL.