YESTERDAY, I was at Scotstoun Stadium for the launch of BT Sport's lucrative new sponsorship of Edinburgh's and Glasgow's - the SRU's two full-time professional rugby teams' shirts for the next four seasons.
Being well-brought-up rugger chaps, neither my media colleagues or I asked the assembled "suits" to put even a ball-park figure on the worth of the deal, suffice to say it dwarfs even the Celtic and Rangers cider deals and perhaps demonstrates that, when it comes to sports sponsorship, really big companies are happier dealing with civilised sports such as rugby or golf, rather than football.
The BT Sport deal is the sort which, if Scottish football had any commercial value and the correct public profile, one might see going the way of the Old Firm, however, as things stand - dream on boys.
ANOTHER thing which struck me on my trip to Scotstoun was, the difference in attitude between footballers and rugby players. As I made my way from the car park to the media suite, I could see the Glasgow players, in the well-equipped gym inside Scotstoun, at 9.45am on a Monday, doing their pre-training warm-up.
Gordon Reid, a six-foot-two by 18 stones prop, was doing a passable Chris Hoy impression on one of the bikes; Scotland player Sean Lamont was doing strides, with a massive weights bar on his shoulders, while the other players were, unsupervised, getting themselves ready for the important outdoor session of the morning.
Even British Lion Ryan Grant, who could still, if he so wished, be resting after his extended season, was in there doing a bit of voluntary training.
Up close, the four Scottish internationalists who were put-up as media fodder: backs Stuart Hogg and Tim Visser and forwards Al Kellock and Ross Ford, are seriously-impressive physical specimens; they glowed with health and well-being to an extent which you wouldn't find with four Scottish football internationalists.
I used to cover one of our top football teams; one which had, unusully, its own, fully-equipped, in-house gym and, even more unusually, a manager, who had qualifications in sports phisiology and knew the benefits of a proper fitness regime.
He encouraged the players to use the gym facilities - very few did and, when they did, their "work" tended to be little more than "hey, look at my gorgeous body" posing for some of the local ladies who were gym members.
As I recall, only three of the Scottish players, plus ALL the foreigners, really put-in the work in that gym and, within five years, only these three Scots were still playing SPL football or had gone to England - the poseurs had all either been retired or had dropped into the lower leagues or the juniors.
Ten years down the line, I still don't see Scottish "professional" footballers giving as much importance to physical conditioning, proper diet and rest and giving themselves a real chance of competing at the top level as do their rugby counterparts.
"Fail to Prepare - Prepare to Fail" is one of those slogans which is often trotted out. Well, Scottish footballers haven't been preparing properly for years, and Scottish football has regularly failed over these years.
When I played, all those years ago; by and large, Scottish rugby forwards couldn't handle their ball and Scottish football defenders couldn't trap theirs. Today, while even prop forwards, who never used to even get to touch the ball, can take and give a pass like a back, Scottish football defenders still struggle to trap a falling bag of cement.
The top Scottish rugby clubs, not just the two full-time outfit, but also the better semi-pro club sides such as Ayr, Gala, Melrose and Stirling County, today insist on good individual skills from the "donkeys" in the front five of the scrum as much as the Brylcreem Boys in the backs. If you're a Scottish footballer, you can still get bye on passion and the ability to propel a fancy-Dan foreigner into a reverse, two-and-a-half somersault, with pike, and only get a yellow card for your trouble.
Rugby only went professional in 1995, in the 18-years since, that game in Scotland has progressed further than its round-ball cousin has in the nearly 125-years of so-called "professional" football in this country.
Of course, the guys running the SRU have all played the game - something which cannot be said of their equivalents on Hampden's sixth floor.
The SRU has made mistakes over these 18-years, but, not nearly as many as the SFA has. Time for a culture change.
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