First came the Tush Push, are we ready for the Philly Jelly?
For the first time in living memory, people are jealous of Philadelphia — an emotion not often connected with the City of Brotherly Love.
When I heard the news that 22 NFL owners voted to ban the Tush Push — with no late game two-vote conversion to meet the required 24 — I smiled.
Not because I particularly love the play, although it has taken much of the anxiety away from short-yardage situations, but because of what the failed effort to banish it says about Philadelphia.
For the first time in living memory, people are jealous of us. Specifically, they are jealous of the Eagles. Jeffrey Lurie and Howie Roseman have turned a team of perennial losers into perhaps the best-run franchise in all of professional sports.
How do I know that envy is the motivator? Per Wharton professor and Eagles analytics nerd Deniz Selman, the team’s 2025 opponents voted 13-1 to ban to push. Teams that don’t play the Eagles voted 9-8. That’s jealousy — and a little bit of fear.
Jealousy is not an emotion often connected with the City of Brotherly Love.
Even during our industrial heyday, comedian and Philadelphia native W.C. Fields would ruthlessly mock his hometown as a dull and boring place. We might have been the workshop of the world, a great place to earn a living, and home to the street that beat Hitler, but we weren’t exciting, and no one was jealous of us.
That didn’t change in the second half of the 20th century. Philadelphia shed its reputation for Waspy staidness, but we also shed hundreds of thousands of residents and jobs. Meanwhile, New York, California, and Texas dominated pop culture. Philadelphia entered the public consciousness with characters like Rocky, the lovable loser.
People might have admired Rocky, who fought valiantly against a stronger opponent. But they weren’t jealous of him. The Italian Stallion got his face bashed in and lost anyway.
The closest thing we have to a civic symbol these days is Eagles quarterback and Tush Push focal point (pushee?) Jalen Hurts. And people are definitely jealous of him.
Just watch any TV segment on Hurts and you can smell the envy through the screen. The 26-year-old has won a college football championship, a Super Bowl, and been awarded Super Bowl MVP.
To top it off, his personal behavior never embarrasses the team. Hurts and his similarly gaffe-free wife, Bryonna Burrows, look like they belong on a magazine cover. NFL analyst Domonique Foxworth went as far as to complain that Hurts benefits from “pretty privilege” before blasting his play. It turns out Foxworth’s fury might have been motivated by his wife’s big crush on the Eagles QB.
In an unexpected development, some people are even jealous of Philadelphia’s fans.
Long derided as the folks who threw snowballs at Santa Claus, Philly sports fans are now known for the raucous and joyful celebrations that happen along Broad Street and at intersections like Frankford and Cottman after big wins. New York Knicks fans tried to get in on the action recently, going as far as climbing poles (even though all they’d won was a trip to the NBA Eastern Conference finals).
It might take a while for Philadelphians to acclimate to the new winning persona. But once we do, our city will become unstoppable. Just like the Tush Push.