"Why not this year?" Italy rugby captain Sergio Parisse wondered last week. Why couldn't his country win the Six Nations Championship, European rugby's showpiece tournament? After all, since the tournament expanded to six teams in 2000, only Italy and Scotland have failed to win it. Surely, he thought, Italy's turn would come soon.

Italy's Giovanbattista Venditti, center, celebrates as he waves a national flag after Italy won their Six Nations rugby match against France at the Olympic stadium in Rome on Feb. 3. Reuters

Parisse's statement wasn't taken too seriously. His ambition was dismissed as just one more over-the-top claim right out of the Don King playbook, pregame hyperbole.

Since 2000, Italy has played the role of scrappy underdog to the established northern-hemisphere titans of England, France, Ireland and Wales. Nine times the Azzurri have finished the tournament with the so-called Wooden Spoon for finishing in last place. And on five of those occasions, they lost all of their matches.

But that was all before last Sunday, when Italy stunned the favorite, France, 23-18 at the Olympic Stadium in Rome in front of 58,000 spectators in its Six Nations opener. Suddenly, Parisse's dream of a title doesn't seem quite so fanciful.

The captain led from the front, scoring a brilliant try to add to that of teammate Martin Castrogiovanni. The victory was sealed by the kicking games of Luciano Orquera, who scored 10 points, and substitute Kris Burton.

"I'm really happy for the team and the fans, after two years we've beaten France again in Rome," Orquera told reporters after the game. "We were mentally extremely strong right from the beginning, we wanted to win at any cost and we were always in the match."

What made Italy's victory stand out was the manner in which the team played. The Italian game has previously relied on two key elements, strength in the scrum and a relentless kicking game. It makes the Azzurri hard to beat, but also hard on the eye. The ball-in-hand running style that normally makes France such a compelling spectacle seems entirely foreign to the Italians.

But in Rome on Sunday, Italy dominated possession and showed a willingness to run the ball, reflecting the philosophy of the team's coach, former France star Jacques Brunel.

This shift in strategy augurs well for the team's ability to compete with the best, a remarkable achievement given the game itself has changed fundamentally over the past 13 years.

Indeed, according to Steve Griffiths, the head of technical services at the International Rugby Board, the ball is being passed far more and kicked less across the six European sides. The pass rate has almost doubled. Kicking out of hand has declined by 45%. The number of scrums and lineouts has fallen by almost 40% each. And the number of rucks and mauls has virtually doubled.

Perhaps the most startling change since Italy's introduction in 2000 however relates to the scrum.

The rules of the game say the purpose of the scrum is "to restart play quickly, safely and fairly, after a minor infringement or a stoppage."

It is formed in the field of play when eight players from each team, bound together in three rows for each team, close up with their opponents so that the heads of the front rows are interlocked. This creates a tunnel into which a scrum half throws in the ball so that front row players can compete for possession by hooking the ball with either of their feet.

But these technical descriptions don't begin to capture its real importance to rugby. The scrum is the macho heart of the game, an unparalleled test of strength and technique. It is also strategically significant: A set piece that, in theory, allows the backline a chance to attack, with the aim of scoring a try by touching the ball down over the opponent's goal line.

Yet something has gone wrong with the scrum, to the detriment of the game as a spectacle. Because of time-wasting techniques and myriad rule changes, scrums are taking up more game time.

"Play is being held up more due to the infringements and other technical issues," Griffiths said. "In 2005 the ball took an average of 29 seconds to come back in to play. This year, that figure is likely to be over a minute."

Worse still, scrums are not leading to attacking opportunities for the team that wins them.

As a result, scrum possession has become a less significant part of the game. In 2012 Wales won every game but had possession from the scrum on only 14 occasions in total. In four matches the team won the ball just three times. Compare this to 2005, Wales's previous Grand Slam, when the forwards won the ball 47 times.

"What we had at Murrayfield was a game of rugby trying to break out in between scrums," said former England coach Martin Johnson following his team's match against Scotland in 2010.

And pity the fans who had paid to watch Ireland play Scotland in Dublin last year. Of the 20 scrums awarded during the game, eight collapsed, seven had to be reset and seven resulted in penalties being awarded.

This took up more than one-quarter of the total playing time: 21 minutes.

Rugby fans have a tendency to romanticize the past, Griffiths said, but the previous eras had their share of problems. "People tend to watch the great free-flowing tries on television and believe that they were typical of the time. That wasn't necessarily the case."

He recalled an infamous match between Wales and Scotland in 1963, a match so boring it forced a change in the laws of the game.

"The ball was kicked in to touch 111 times in 80 minutes," he said. The IRB then changed the rule so that if you kicked the ball straight into touch while outside the 22 then there was no gain in ground. "The memory plays tricks."

But as its style evolves, Italy, at least, is happy to forget the past.