BEAR with me on this one.

As the son of a one-time Greenock Wanderers fly-half, I was reared on rugby union. I never felt I was tall enough or quick enough to be any good, but as a kid glued to the telly on Six Nations days, there were few things in sport more scintillating than a lightning line break or an elusive piece of running resulting in a try.

While Scotland's agonising defeat to Wales at Murrayfield last Sunday occasionally had me up off the sofa again - rather more of a rarity in these days of perfectly drilled rush defences and supreme athletic specimens - it also got me thinking. Most particularly, why is the part of my brain which once fell in love with this game, now hard-wired instead to the NFL, a sport which exhibits many of the same characteristics, not unsurprisingly as it was developed in the USA and Canada after the British colonists had introduced rugby and soccer across the pond?

There is only one conclusion I can reach. As gridiron embraced professionalism early on, the rules have caught up, unlike some of the laws of rugby, which can appear hopelessly anachronistic and inadequate for this brave new era.

Forget about picking the bones out of the Finn Russell citing affair and let's start with Exhibit A, the scrum. Sure, devotees of the dark arts will swear blind that the intricacies of the interplay between the respective front rows is all part of the sport's magic, but to the casual viewer - which I remain - all these endless sets and re-sets, and the resultant bewilderingly random penalty awards, are hardly TV gold.

Compare this, not with the equally pointless uncontested scrums featured in rugby league, but with its counterpoint in American football, the line of scrimmage. There, clear space separates these same hulking giants, and with a team of officials with their eyes trained on the action, it is usually clear as day if someone jumps early or commits a hold.

My next bugbear is the thorny issue of clock management. I guess players since time immemorial have got up to no good when the referee's back is turned, but rugby's rulers have to realise that the amateur era is long gone and gamesmanship and deliberate fouling is all part of the package these days. The odd yellow card here and there is woefully insufficient to police a fully professional sport, where one major club side can go to the lengths of telling their players to chew blood capsules to deceive a referee about injury.

Nothing as flagrant as that happened on Sunday, but fully 40 seconds remained on the clock when a Scotland try brought the score back to 26-21, only three of which were used up by Russell adding the conversion. The rest was taken up by a rammy caused by Wales' cynical refusal to return the ball, Russell's preparations to take the kick, and the Welsh lumbering back into position to take the restart.

Say what you like about the NFL, but such time-wasting antics would not be allowed to define the match outcome. There, an electronic clock, clearly visible to the players, stops whenever the ball is out of play. Surely it is time for something similar to be applied in rugby. The match might last half-an-hour longer, but few paying customers would complain about that, and with defences tiring there might just be a few more of those scintillating line breaks.

While we are at it, given the difficulty of scoring a try, compared with a penalty, why not downgrade a penalty to two points or take another leaf out of the NFL's book by awarding six points, and a chip shot conversion from under the posts, for those teams able to breach their opponents' defensive line.

Regrettably, there is also likely to be one last side effect of professionalism in rugby. The bigger, stronger and faster players get - allied to the brutality of clearing out at rucks, such as one hit on Stuart Hogg on Sunday - the more the game's authorities may have to act to limit concussions and spinal injuries. Will the day come when we see rugby stars forced to wear NFL-style protective helmets?