The Eagles’ Tush Push is probably going to be banned. Here’s the real reason why.

Fear is at the heart of the campaign to ban the Tush Push, and most of those fears — at least the ones that executives, officials, and coaches around the NFL have expressed publicly — don’t have much merit.

Fear that the Eagles, who have pioneered and mastered the play, will ride their tushes to another Super Bowl. (Sorry, singling out a team for its innovation and excellence is weak.) Fear that a player or players will suffer serious injury by lowering their heads and hurling themselves into each other. (No data yet exist to suggest the push is more dangerous than what does or might happen during an average pro football game.) Fear that the Tush Push is so aesthetically unappealing — that it isn’t a “real football play” — that it will turn off fans if it’s used too frequently. (Aesthetic appeal, on the gridiron or anywhere else, is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. I think Vince Lombardi said that.)

All of these assertions and arguments were easy to dismiss until Tuesday. The league’s owners, at their annual meeting, tabled a vote until May to do away with the Tush Push. And commissioner Roger Goodell made it clear that he would like the league to reinstate the rule prohibiting any player from pushing any ballcarrier forward.

“That expands it beyond that single play,” Goodell told reporters. “There are a lot of plays where you see people pushing or pulling somebody that are not in the Tush Push formation that I think do have an increased risk of injury. So I think the [NFL competition] committee will look at that and come back in May with some proposals.”

So why would Goodell be so set on doing away with the Tush Push? A coach might not want to have his team devote so much practice time and preparation to it. A general manager might not be inclined to build a roster that can pull off the play. An owner might be bitter or pouty that Jeffrey Lurie’s franchise has a new weapon in the championship arms race. But Goodell is a different case because he’s supposed to protect the interests of the entire league. And it’s there, in a commissioner’s role as the guardian of revenue, that the NFL’s real problem with the Tush Push reveals itself.

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A recent and terrific series of articles by the Washington Post’s Dave Sheinin highlighted what leagues have come to regard as an existential threat: the possibility that a team or teams could “break” a sport. That is, a franchise could use, and in some instances has used, statistical analysis or a “loophole” in the rules to render the action on the field, on the court, or on the ice predictable and inevitable. Predictability and inevitability lead to boredom, and boredom is death to pro sports.

Major League Baseball set itself on this course and has already taken measures to correct it. The game’s analytics revolution led to a general pursuit of the three “true outcomes” — home runs, walks, and strikeouts — a steep decline in some of its most exciting plays and moments (e.g. triples, stolen bases, complete games), and an acknowledgment that more and more people, from casual fans to hard-core seamheads, thought the sport had gotten tedious and stale. So the bases have been enlarged to encourage stealing, and shifts have been banned in the hope that more balls put in play will result in hits, and a pitch clock keeps each game moving at a robust pace.

The NBA is facing a similar crisis (“crisis” being a relative term for a league that just signed an 11-year, $76 billion media-rights deal). The three-pointer has come to define success or failure, and there’s a simple reason: math. It is worth 50% more than any other shot on the floor, than a turnaround 16-footer or a ferocious dunk or any of the breathtaking, improvisational moves that were specialties of players such as Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Allen Iverson. The corner three is the highest-investment play in the sport, the shot from the shortest distance for the greatest value.

It’s no coincidence that last season’s Boston Celtics, who cruised to a championship, took and made more three-pointers than any other team, and it’s no coincidence that three title contenders this season — the Celtics, the Golden State Warriors, and the Cleveland Cavaliers — are among the four most three-happy teams in the league. Awesome for those clubs, sure, but not so much for the NBA, which has sacrificed much of the creativity and spontaneity and many of the differing styles of play that once made it so fascinating and fun.

If you think Goodell and the NFL’s owners haven’t been monitoring those developments, you’re crazy. They want to avoid what Rob Manfred and MLB had to go through and what Adam Silver and the NBA are going through now. They’re trying to get ahead of a similar trend by snuffing out a mechanism that could strip drama and excitement away from each game.

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Remember: The Eagles kick-started the league’s own reevaluation of risk and probability in 2017, when they routinely went for it on fourth down and their daring won them a Super Bowl. They’ve converted roughly 85% of their quarterback-sneak attempts over the last three seasons. Think it through. Play it out. In an NFL in which going for it on fourth-and-short is no longer a big deal, what happens when more teams master the Tush Push or something like it and drain those moments — Can the offense keep a critical drive alive? Can the D get a stop? — of any tension and uncertainty? Easy. Fans might start losing some interest, and pro football might not be quite as popular as it once was, and …

That’s why it’s safe to bet that the Tush Push will soon be history. That’s the fear of all fears here. Money. That’s the crux of the matter. It’s the NFL. Money always is.