Where do the USA Men's National team players come from?

It's a question we ask often when the squad is assembled. I do this analysis many different ways, and this time I am going to go as specific as I can be, but be general in other areas.

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We're looking at whether these players are home grown or not, qualify for the USA by birth or by residency, and whether they were always in the pipeline.

Isn't that what we want to know? We want to know if the Eagles are simply hired guns or have come through the process in some way. Here's what we have:

So what that tells us is that the USA team is still a mix of players from all backgrounds. We've got kids who played well in high school, and didn't go to college and often went straight into professional rugby (five of those). We've got athletes who excelled in rugby in high school and then played football in college (three of those, plus Paul Lasike, who was a rugby player recruited to play football at BYU).

We've got players who grew up with the game overseas: 10 of them.

And we've got players where we can say the pipeline worked. The players were in age-grade or college All Americans, or at least played in high school select side before making a move (to football, to professional or semi-professional rugby). All of those count. We're going to count Samu Manoa as he was picked up after playing football in college to return to rugby as part of the SFGG Super League team. That was a league that was part of the pipeline at the time. We've got 25 in that list.