How many colleges in the U.S. have rugby teams?
College rugby
Today, college rugby continues to grow in popularity, and rugby is one of the fastest growing club sports across college campuses. The 32,000 registered college players in 2010 marked a 14% increase from 28,000 college players in 2008. Over 180 college rugby clubs started between 2010 and 2014.
The National Small College Rugby Organization grew from 85 teams in 2007 to 151 teams in 2011 and to over 200 men's teams for 2012. 
Several schools have increased their investments in men's and women's rugby programs, by creating rugby programs with varsity or quasi-varsity status and funding for scholarships, and Notre Dame and Texas have upgraded their rugby programs from "club" status to "Olympic" status.
United States national rugby union team
Informal football games such as rugby became popular in the United States in the mid-19th century. Rugby union was played as early as 1872 among rugby clubs in the San Francisco Bay Area composed mainly of British expatriates. On December 2, 1882, the first Californian representative rugby team to play an outside opponent, took on a group of rugby-playing ex-Britons, who called themselves the Phoenix Rugby Club of San Francisco. California lost to the Phoenix club 7–4.
The first recorded rugby game in the U.S. place in May 1874 when local Harvard University hosted Canadian McGill University. The game sparked an interest on college campuses nationwide. In 1876 Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia formed the Intercollegiate Football Association, which largely used the rugby code. In 1886 Harvard's Oscar Shafter Howard introduced these rules to the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.