The 2023 MLR Collegiate Draft had a No. 1 overall pick. Two years later, so did 2025. Both locks. Both American. Both on the field today. That kind of symmetry is easy to flatten into a talking point, but the number is honestly the least interesting part of it.
Rick Rose is from Cleveland. He spent four years at St. Bonaventure, turning himself into the kind of player who ends up a captain. Miami took him first overall in 2023. Three seasons on, the professional record looks like this: 41 tackles through three weeks, the most of any second row in the league. Fifteen lineouts won. Zero career tries
He’s at Old Glory DC now, which is its own kind of story. DC is a team that keeps reaching the postseason and keeps finding the door locked. They’re competitive, disciplined, and hard to beat on any given Saturday. The question that has followed them for a few seasons now is whether consistency will ever be enough. Rose fits. He’s not a player who needs the game to be built around him, and Old Glory’s been looking for exactly that kind of anchor in the second row.
Will Sherman’s story reads differently. First overall in 2025, Collegiate All-American at UCLA, USA U23 vice-captain. People have had an eye on him for a while. There’s a detail worth mentioning: his father visited Sydney as a teenager, came home obsessed with rugby, and that’s where the whole thing started for the family. Sherman found out he was the No. 1 pick while living in a Sydney apartment. It’s the kind of thing that sounds made up, but it’s not.
Before he played a minute of professional rugby, he toured South Africa with a USA U23 side coached by Anthem’s own Agustín Cavalieri. So he arrived in Charlotte already knowing the system, already knowing what Cavalieri wanted. Through three weeks: 33 tackles, five lineouts won, and one try. It’s a good start.
The difference between them isn’t really about age, though the age gap is real. It’s more about what each of them still has to settle.
Rose has spent three seasons earning credibility in a way that doesn’t come with much recognition. He showed up, did the work, didn’t make a fuss. That builds a certain kind of trust with the people in the room. The No. 1 pick label is part of his past now. What it actually means has been decided week by week.
Sherman is still figuring out what version of himself exists at this level. The early signs are good. The things that made him the top pick, the physicality, the reliability, the ability to stay involved across phases, seem to be holding up. But professional rugby moves faster, and the margins are tighter, and being a promising domestic forward is different from being a consistent professional one. That’s not a knock. It’s just the next question.
The lineout is where the contrast will be sharpest. Rose has won fifteen this season, Sherman five. Some of that gap is just experience reading timing, knowing when to vary movement, and understanding where to apply pressure on someone else’s throw. Sherman’s task is to hold Anthem’s platform regardless of what Rose throws at it. That’s a legitimate test.
There’s a broader reason to pay attention to this one. Two USA-eligible domestic locks, produced by the same college-to-pro pathway two years apart, on opposite sides of the same game. Whatever the league wants to say about developing American forwards, today is a small piece of the evidence.
The result is for the teams. But somewhere inside it, in a contested lineout, in a shared collision late in the second half, there’s a quieter question being answered. Whether three seasons of 41 tackles and 15 lineouts and no fuss still holds the line against whatever is coming next.