Football

PHOENIX – The Tush Push witch hunt that made last year's NFL annual meeting about terse exchanges among NFL royalty, showed how duplicitous the NFL office can be when it wants, and had multiple NFL people admit that if you can't beat ‘em, get them banned, is not a thing at this year’s meeting.This year’s NFL owners meetings began here on Sunday and the Tush Push is not on the agenda, won't be debated and is not on anybody´s lips, and that includes Philadelphia Eagles coach Nick Sirianni.Sirianni, who privately feels a strong connection to the play, is publicly being guarded about predicting the play is clear of renewed future scrutiny."I don't know, you take one step at a time," Sirianni said Monday morning. "It's not something I have to think about right now. So, I guess I don't really have a lot of thoughts on that. We'll play by the rules of whatever we need to be able to do in every aspect."So the league is in quite a different place than it was one year ago when the Green Bay Packers proposed the play be banned, then the NFL office surreptitiously worked to make that happen, and practically every team in the NFC that knew if had to defend against the play on the field used its off-the-field vote to ban the Eagles' signature play.But this year, well, nothing. The Tush Push lives and perhaps the debate about the play is over. "I don't know that it's the end of the debate, because I think there's still people that are concerned with the whole pushing element," NFL Competition Committee co-Chairman Rich McKay said. "But I would say to you that, just like last year I told you – there was no Competition Committee proposal last year on the Tush Push, there was no proposal the year before on that."And over the years, we've now seen that the Tush Push is going down. The percentage of, or I should say the number of plays it's being used on, is going down. The success rate on the traditional sneak is above the Tush Push success rate. So, I just think there's less talk about it within the football community, and there was no proposal on the table to put anything in this year to deal with that."This, of course, is one explanation why the Tush Push isn't a big deal this year. But it's a snapshot from an instamatic (look it up, Gen Z) rather than a portrait.And to fill in the extra pixels, one must understand that while it is true the Competition Committee made no proposal on the play last year, McKay was against it and the committee ultimately favored banning the play. League officials all the way on up to perhaps even commissioner Roger Goodell preferred that the Tush Push be banned. Goodell consistently mentioned his health and safety concerns regarding the play despite there being no health and safety data to present as evidence.There are another couple of reasons the Tush Push lives on. Sean McDermott is gone as the coach of the Buffalo Bills and he – and his team by extension – were an ardent opponent of the Tush Push last year. The Bills were one of only two AFC teams that voted to effectively ban the Tush Push – and then used the Tush Push in their offensive repertoire during the season.The Green Bay Packers are still around. But club president Mark Murphy, who spearheaded that team's effort to get the Tush Push banned, retired. So another net-plus for the Tush Push.We should recall that about half the NFL was prepared to vote in favor of banning the Tush Push at last year's annual meeting. But that didn't reach the three-fourth plateau the measure needed.So the NFL, whipping votes beforehand, decided to avoid defeat by never taking the vote. The vote was tabled during those meetings at the end of March and the issue was pushed to another league meeting in May. In past years, pushing issues to the next meeting had been a tool the NFL used to win the day because the May meeting allowed league personnel to lobby owners in favor of their measures, knowing coaches and general managers would not attend that next meeting.The proposal in May still fell two votes short, 22-10 in favor of a ban. Only one NFC team, aside from the Eagles, voted to keep the play:The Detroit Lions.While the initial proposal from the Packers focused on player safety, McKay later admitted that the discussion in the room in Palm Beach ventured away from player safety into aesthetics.It’s worth noting the Eagles were not as successful with the play last season. In their 2024 Super Bowl season, the Eagles converted over 81 percent of the time on the Tush Push. That percentage sank to 63.6 percent in 2025.Suddenly, all those NFC teams that hated the play last spring because it was such a huge headache in 2024 don't feel quite so motivated to get rid of it now.