There’s no end in sight for the tush push.
A year after the controversial play survived a vote by NFL teams, the league’s competition committee co-chairman said he does not expect another attempt to outlaw the tush push this offseason.
“There’s no team proposal that I’ve seen from it,” Rich McKay said at the NFL combine, according to ESPN. “So, I wouldn’t envision it. But you never know.”
Popularized and virtually perfected by the Philadelphia Eagles, the tush push is a short-yardage play in which two offensive players line up behind the quarterback and push him forward once the ball is snapped.
It is a big reason why Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts has rushed for 60 touchdowns and 311 first downs over the past five seasons.
But the much-debated tush push remains a polarizing NFL issue, with safety concerns, inconsistent officiating, and the visually unappealing nature of the play among the points frequently floated by its detractors.
Last February, the Green Bay Packers proposed to ban the tush push, citing “player safety” and “pace of play.”
“I am not a fan of this play,” former Packers president and CEO Mark Murphy wrote on the team website last year, shortly before he retired in July.
“There is no skill involved and it is almost an automatic first down on plays of a yard or less. … The play is bad for the game, and we should go back to prohibiting the push of the runner.”
Had at least 24 of the NFL teams, or 75%, voted in favor of outlawing the play last May, it would have been banned. But only 22 teams voted to prohibit the tush push, allowing it to live on.
The Giants were among the teams that voted to ban the tush push. The Jets were among those that voted in favor of allowing the play to remain.
Other teams have tried to use the tush push, with the Josh Allen-led Buffalo Bills also finding success with their version of the play. But no team has deployed it as successfully as head coach Nick Sirianni’s Eagles, whose fan base refers to the play as the “Brotherly Shove.”
Last season, the Eagles led the NFL with 27 tush-push attempts — or about 1.6 per game — followed by the Bills with 17, according to ESPN.
The NFL as a whole ran 112 tush pushes, up from 101 in 2024.
“We’re just discussing it lightly, not a lot. It’s a very difficult play to officiate from the line judges,” Troy Vincent, the NFL’s EVP of football operations, said earlier this month, according to The Athletic.
“We’ve got some work to do. We’ll revisit that particular play, and we’ll see how the membership feels about it if they want to do anything about it.”
Other potential rule changes on this offseason’s agenda involve the NFL’s playoff seeding, as well as the league’s much-scrutinized standards for what constitutes a catch.
But McKay said he does not anticipate a “big year” in terms of proposals from the 32 teams.
“The game is in a pretty good place,” McKay said.
