USA Rugby announced earlier this week that the Men's Collegiate All-Americans will play Oxford University on September 16 as the curtain-raiser to the Premiership Rugby clash between Newcastle and Saracens in Chester, PA, but that's not the whole story.

First off, this isn't a plug-and-play situation -- or announce and play, in this case. Mid-September could hardly be a worse time for a collegiate all-star team to play a rugby game. Athletes are just getting started with their classes and likely their college rugby teams and are thinking about starting the year off right. Take a break for several days, even a week, and play for the All-Americans in Pennsylvania? It's not that easy.

The idea for the game itself sprung out of the enthusiasm and energy of Conor Kearns, a Collegiate All-American himself and former USA U20s player. He finished his undergraduate work at Trinity (Dublin University) in Ireland and was a top performer there before moving on to Oxford, where he is pursuing a masters in pharmacology at Somerville College, Oxford. The 24-year-old has also become the captain of the Oxford University team, a unique honor for a USA player.

Kearns is helping organize Oxford's tour of the USA and was looking for some Ivy League opposition for the Dark Blues. After some enquiries, it was decided through Kearns and USA Rugby high performance director Alex Magleby that maybe an All-American opponent would work better.

So this event has actually been orchestrated by Americans on both sides of the Atlantic.

Whether it will work for the USA is another matter. All-Americans head coach Gavin Hickie and his staff have a ton of work to do to find players who are available to play. Most likely, Hickie will be looking for athletes who graduated from college this past spring, and while those players might be busy trying to get themselves established at new jobs or in new hometowns or with new rugby teams, they might have a little more flexibility than players who are back at school.

So look for many players who toured with the All-Americans last summer to get a look. Does it matter if they've graduated already? Not really, considering Oxford fields a team heavy with graduate students. So a collegiate team heavy with those who graduated this past spring would fit.

The bigger issue is not that the All-Americans and Oxford are playing a game but instead the consistency of the All-American program as a whole. As has been widely acknowledged, USA Rugby is in horrendous financial straits and can't afford to fund a tour for the All-Americans. So any trip for that team would have to be funded and organized privately. We're back to how it used to be, in effect.

But that also means that someone has to do some planning. If players and coaches agree that an annual or bi-annual tour for the All-Americans makes sense, then someone has to step up to plan it, find a destination, and find a way to pay for it. The sad issue isn't that USA Rugby couldn't afford to do it this year but that the wait to find out if anything was happening was far too long.

Too often an All-American tour has been announced at the last minute. Many would agree that now, this June and July, would be the perfect time to plan for next summer. We might not know who the players are, or the exact timeline, but we do know that college rugby players are eager to represent their country as All-Americans. And we do know that next year in June, summer will come again.