PALM BEACH, Fla. — The NFL’s debate on the future of the Tush Push has been tabled.
The proposal from the Green Bay Packers presented this week at the NFL’s annual meetings was to make the push element of the Philadelphia Eagles' signature quarterback sneak play illegal. Opinions were clearly split on the Tush Push entering Tuesday and this debate will be revisited.
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WATCH HEREThe next league meetings are in May.
The proposal would have needed support from 24 of 32 owners to pass and it clearly didn’t have the votes. According to Jonathan Jones of CBS Sports, there were 16 teams that opposed the rule change.
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Competition Committee chairman Rich McKay said the debate lasted 30-40 minutes and went beyond potential player safety concerns into the aesthetics of the play.
The fate of the Tush Push has been one of the biggest topics at these meetings at The Breakers with some strong opinions on both sides. The Eagles have obviously been pushing hard (no pun intended) to keep a play that has been huge for them and hasn’t worked nearly as well for other teams.
“You guys know my opinion on it,” Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni said on Tuesday morning ahead of the scheduled vote. “I’m not going to continue to dive into it. My opinion is very well documented and I won’t continue to dive into that. I think maybe that’s why there’s so many cameras here today to talk about that. I still stand where I stood when we talked at the Combine. We’ll see how it goes down. Have I been lobbying? I’ve talked to a couple people, yeah. We’ll see how it goes today.”
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While NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent said in late February that there were no injuries on the play in 2024, one argument from the Packers and other teams on that side has still been about player safety.
The word Buffalo Bills head coach and Competition Committee member Sean McDermott used on Monday was “proactive” — meaning that eliminating the play could prevent future injuries.
“We were healthy on the play,” Sirianni said. “I believe the entire NFL was healthy on the play. I always want to have players health first and foremost in our mind. And so you have to trust the doctors and stuff like that on those scenarios but you always want to do what’s best for the players, first and foremost.”
But McKay made it clear on Tuesday that the debate around the play was not limited to potential injury concern. It also centered around the aesthetic of the play and whether or not it belongs in the game.
"I would say that there are definitely some people that have health and safety concerns but there's just as many people that have football concerns," McKay said. "... I wouldn't say it was because of one particular health and safety video or discussion. It was much more about the play, the aesthetics of the play, is it what football has been traditionally, is it more a rugby play. All those types of discussions. Health and safety is still there, that potential, but I wouldn't go beyond that."
There was a proposal to ban the play two years ago that never even made it this far, so it’s fair to say there’s more support for banning the play this year. We’ll see if support grows enough by May to actually pass a rule change.
There’s a strong belief that the Eagles would still be very good at traditional quarterback sneaks without the push element. Sirianni was asked about that on Tuesday.
“I don’t get into hypotheticals,” Sirianni said. “We’d be good at it, no doubt. Because we have really good players … You don’t coach the push different. The push just has extra push. Everything else is coached exactly the same. And so we got a lot of reps at it and we’ve been really successful at it. I think we’d be able to be successful either way. But I think there’s a lot of exciting things that can happen off the push.”
