Inside Aussie rules football’s unique relationship with NFL

At first, Mason Cox was sure the email that changed his life was a prank.

Cox’s basketball career at Oklahoma State had just ended when a member of the school’s sports information department received a note from someone professing to be interested in Cox’s “athletic ability.” Until then Cox’s athletic ability mostly had been hidden since the walk-on had played just 57 minutes and scored seven points in college.

But what really raised eyebrows was why the writer was interested in his subtle skills: Cox was being asked to try out for something called Australian rules football.

Oklahoma State supporter T. Boone Pickens, center, celebrates with Cowboys basketball players Marcus Smart (33), Mason Cox (30), Le’Bryan Nash (2) and Alex Budke, right, after a 2019 NCAA tournament win over Texas. Cox went on to play Australian Rules football.

(Brody Schmidt/AP)

“We didn’t believe it was a real thing,” he said. “Surely at some point, being sports fanatics, we would have seen this sport on TV or ‘SportsCenter.’ We never did.”

Nine years later the sport still is largely ignored by U.S. television, which is a shame because Cox, who decided to go to that tryout, has become the best American player in Aussie rules history, scoring 117 goals in 112 games for Collingwood, a Melbourne-based team that has won 15 national titles.

“Every person I’ve ever introduced it to, they become obsessed with it,” he said of the sport. “Anyone who watches it is almost intrigued by how unique it is. Everyone is just like, ‘This the most insane thing I’ve ever seen in my life.’”

A fast-paced mashup of soccer and rugby played on a cricket ground with a plump, oval-shaped ball, Aussie rules, or footy, was born in Australia 165 years ago. And at the professional level at least, it has remained there.

Yet if the sport is a secret to the rest of the world, it borders on a religion Down Under, where the game is played by 517,000 registered participants. There are more than 2,500 club teams, including the 18 in the top-tier Australian Football League — 15 of whom broke records for club membership this season.

The Collingwood Magpies’ Mason Cox kicks the ball during a match against Gold Coast Suns at Heritage Bank Stadium on July 01 in Gold Coast, Australia.

(Chris Hyde / AFL Photos via Getty Images)

The league’s Grand Final has drawn average crowds of about 100,000 in each of the past 13 non-COVID seasons. By comparison the NFL’s Super Bowl, played in a country with 300 million more people, has had a crowd that large just once this century.

“It’s kind of this weird enigma,” said Cox, 32, who was born in Texas but has lived in Australia long enough to develop an accent. “The rest of the world, it’s not quite as publicized and people don’t really know about it. But it holds its weight in comparison to other sports.”

The game recently has begun…