Agreed. Crowe carries a lot of influence in the USA. However he needs something to work with. We need to recognize Spinner Howland's USARL as the sole organization, and get all rugby league clubs to fall in line behind it.

Second I think in the future we ought to hold a couple of rounds of the NRL and Super League played in the US, with the NRL and SL clubs based in major US cities. Promote the clubs as the club of that US city, and most important, have the subsequent regular NRL and SL games back in Australia and Europe shown on a free to air US TV channel (as of now it is only shown on FoxSoccerPlus, which is a subscription channel).

SBW was picked as MoM!

As I feared, they are talking about him as a future NFL player.

It's not, most Americans struggle to understand that RL and RU are different sports, they refer to both as just 'rugby' and their perception of the sport usually depends on which code they were exposed to first. Americans getting a good look at RU and seeing how bad it is is definitely not good for RL. On the other hand, RL could probably piggyback pretty effectively off any publicity or interest, although there is no RL presence in Chicago anyway so this whole thread is pretty irrelevant just like most of the threads created by this OP.

We're not dealing with the sharpest knives in the cutlery drawer here....so no harm done!