Should the NFL Ban the Tush Push?

The short-yardage play may be demoralizing, but it's not unstoppable

Photo by Casey Murphy on Unsplash

Frankie Luvu can jump. He didn’t quite get his timing right and was flagged on back-to-back plays for leaping over the Eagles’ offensive line, but at least he tried to stop the Eagles’ tush push. And while Luvu’s little adventure in the NFC Championship Game was a funny sequence, it also reignited a debate that’s simmered for the past two years: should the NFL ban the tush push?

The Eagles debuted the play in 2022 – essentially a variation on the QB sneak where two players line up behind Jalen Hurts and give him an additional push forward. Hurts has an unusually strong lower body (he can squat 600 pounds), helping him power through gridlock at the line of scrimmage, and former Eagles center Jason Kelce is a future Hall of Famer. The Eagles’ elite personnel made the play an instant success, and three main lines of criticism emerged in response: it’s not a football play, it’s an injury risk, and it gives the offense an unfair advantage. As it happens, none are convincing.

Aesthetic grounds are always a weak reason for a rule change. Unfortunately, that’s the basis for much of the opposition to the tush push – the comical idea that it’s somehow “not a football play”. But if the league’s going to ban the tush push, what about players pushing their teammates forward through a scrum as a play develops? The latter has always been part of the sport and probably always will be – it’s impractical to ban players from giving teammates an additional push and would give the defense a distinct advantage in some situations. There’s no consistent principle the league can apply to ban one but not the other.

As for the tush push’s injury risk, that’s still mostly speculation based on the fact that it’s a short-yardage play. While it’s true that short-yardage plays have a higher risk of injury, I have yet to see any data showing that the tush push is meaningfully different from other short-yardage plays in that respect. The Eagles don’t run the tush push on 1^st and 10. They run it when they need to pick up a single yard, and they’d simply run a more traditional short-yardage play (QB sneak, HB dive, maybe even some fullback action) if the tush push were banned. It’s been around for three years now and the safety argument against it is still a hypothetical. That’s not exactly a compelling reason to ban the play.

And though the tush push is an incredibly successful play, it’s by no means an automatic first down. It’s an extraordinarily difficult play to stop, but that masks the fact that it’s an extraordinarily difficult play to pull off. It requires a remarkably strong quarterback and an elite offensive line, and most teams would consider themselves lucky to have just one. It’s also worth noting that the Eagles’ success rate with the play has steadily declined. When the Eagles debuted it in 2022, they converted at an astonishing 93% rate. Last season, that fell to 83%, and it fell further to about 76% through November this year. So the best tush pushing team in the league now fails on about a quarter of their attempts. That’s still a strikingly impressive success rate, but the play is far from unstoppable.

That’s not what outgoing Packers president Mark Murphy thinks, though. A critic of the tush push, Murphy recently claimed that “There is no skill involved” in the play. But if that’s true, why hasn’t it seen the same usage or success across the league? As of September 2024, the Eagles had attempted 41 more tush pushes than the closest team. Other teams have tried the play with their own twists – the Ravens and Bills are notable examples – but nobody’s done it nearly as well as the Eagles. After all, why would teams run a tough play they might not pull off when QB sneaks succeed over 80% of the time? Short-yardage plays are always hard to stop, and while the tush push gives the Eagles a unique advantage, it’s only a marginal one.

The tush push isn’t an unfair hack that’s breaking football. It’s an elite short-yardage play that’s only possible because of the Eagles’ elite personnel. Most tush pushes gain a yard, two at most, so the antidote is pretty obvious – don’t let the Eagles within a yard or two of a first down or touchdown. Easier said than done, especially facing a team with Saquon Barkley, A.J. Brown, and DeVonta Smith, but the point stands. If teams don’t want to succumb to the tush push, they need to play better defense on earlier downs.

This offseason won’t be the first time the NFL has considered a tush push ban. The league’s competition committee reviewed the play each of the last two offseasons and decided to let it continue. Reportedly, the potential reception of a ban factored into last year’s decision to keep allowing the play. The league’s right to be cautious. Banning a specific play used mostly by one team – a team that’s faced the Chiefs in 2 of the last 3 Super Bowls – would only inflame fan allegations that the playing field is slanted toward Kansas City.

The NFL should also look warily at its recent rule changes, especially on kickoffs. For the sake of player safety, the league first banned the kicking team from running before the ball was kicked off, then completely overhauled kickoffs this year. The first change was sensible, with some disappointing side effects; the second has been an utter disaster. The new kickoff rules effectively eliminate the possibility of onside kicks, making it far more difficult to mount a comeback and taking much-needed dynamism and unpredictability out of the game. Rule changes can improve the game, but they need to have clear, data-based, unambiguous benefits. When they don’t, as with the new kickoff format, they inevitably fall flat.

If the NFL eliminates the tush push this offseason, the league’s credibility will take a serious hit. It wouldn’t be a broad-based rule change to improve player safety. It would be a targeted attack on one team, and it would only feed suspicions that the league is biased toward the Chiefs. Sports should reward excellence, not punish it. The fact that a team does something unusually well is a pitiful reason to ban it.