NFL owners showed disdain for the Eagles and Philly fans, but the Tush Push remains unstoppable
This Tush Push debate was never about safety or aesthetics. It was always about resentment, jealousy, and pettiness.
If the Eagles have a sense of humor, regardless of score or field position, the first play they run in their season opener against Dallas on the night of Thursday, Sept. 4, will be the Tush Push.
It would be a fitting middle finger at a league that so deeply resents the town and the team that it tried to legislate a completely legitimate play that is the essence of football: strength vs. strength.
This debate was never about player safety or aesthetics or the purity of football, which is a contradiction in itself.
It always was about punishing a franchise and a fan base whose composition and disposition made NFL traditionalists squirm. Now that the Philadelphia Eagles and their fans sit on top of the world, the rest of the league will do whatever it can to take them down.
Step 1: Demonize the Tush Push.
Never before has a league tried to deem a play illegal because one team was better at it than all of the others.
For the moment, that effort has failed. At the spring owners meetings Wednesday, retired Eagles center Jason Kelce, godfather of the Tush Push, campaigned against the ban during morning meetings. Kelce, who spent two seasons at the bottom of Tush Push dogpiles, specifically pushed back against the unfounded notion that the play is likely to cause more injuries than other football plays.
It worked.
The Tush Push haters needed 24 of 32 owners to vote for the ban. They got just 22 votes.
Nice job, Jason.
Put it another way: They somehow got 22 votes. That’s two votes shy of sanctioned stupidity.
No one likes us, no one likes us,
No one likes us. We don’t care.
We are Philly, bleepin’ Philly,
No one likes us, we don’t care.
That’s the dirty ditty Kelce serenaded Eagles fans with along the parade route following their Super Bowl LVII win. It applies more today than ever.
It’s notable that the Lions, possibly the first victims of the Tush Push in 2022, reportedly did not support the ban. Neither did the Ravens, coached by former Eagles assistant John Harbaugh; the Patriots, whose owner, Robert Kraft, is good friends with Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie; or the Jets, whose sturdy new quarterback, Justin Fields, like Eagles QB Jalen Hurts, is an excellent Tush Push weapon.
Deliciously this season, fate has conspired to send the Eagles to Green Bay, the team that officially proposed the legislation, and to Buffalo, perhaps the rule’s biggest supporter — and, hypocritically, the play’s second-biggest user.
Vengeance will be theirs.
At any rate, the Push lives on.
It is a debate that never should have happened.
We’ve already addressed how pathetic it is that teams with inferior personnel and inferior coaching decided that the only way to even the playing field with the Eagles is to change the rules.
Why persecute Philly and the Birds?
A long-standing resentment by a football establishment that, for more than three decades, has seen the Eagles’ front office as football outsiders and has seen the city as a cesspool and its fans as low-class louts. If it had been banned, NFL blue bloods would have not only taken something away from a franchise they loathe, but they also could have pointed to recent successes as tainted, since those successes came about partially because of a play deemed illegal.
It’s not dangerous. It’s not rugby. It’s simple. Everybody else is jealous.
In March, an ESPN report cited a coach who called the initiative “petty” and a league executive who admitted that the green-eyed monster fueled the ridiculous debate:
“It’s weak. … It’s punishing a team who became excellent at executing the play. … Other teams copied it, and they can’t do it as well. It reeks of jealousy.”
It reeks, indeed.
If the Dallas Cowboys or the New England Patriots or the Green Bay Packers or the Pittsburgh Steelers executed the play with the alacrity of the Philadelphia Eagles, this sort of legislation would never be composed. If it had been presented, it would be shouted down and laughed out of court as sour grapes from lesser men.
And imagine — just imagine — if the Eagles, with their horrible fans and their interloper owner and their bookish general manager, had composed legislation banning the most he-man play on the books. They would have been relegated to the UFL.
The NFL will never get over that Lurie was neither a bare-knuckles industrialist or an Ivy League sports hero. The NFL always will resent that Lurie, Joe Banner, and Howie Roseman, decidedly not “football guys,” have appeared in four of the last 21 Super Bowls and have won two of them, far above average; in fact, that rate teeters on elite. The NFL has a hard time stomaching the fact that Nick Sirianni, who will taunt both your fans and his, conceived of a play that uses his available personnel impeccably, and that he deploys that weapon with astonishing wisdom and timing.
The argument that the Tush Push is somehow not a “football play“ is like arguing a shovel pass isn’t a real pass. Sure, it’s unconventional, but it’s legal, and it works (and Andy Reid probably would retire if he couldn’t use the shovel pass anymore).
Besides, most football plays are pretty ugly. In fact, almost all of them fail in producing the ultimate desired outcome: a touchdown. This play, however, almost always produces a touchdown whenever a team is close to the goal line. So now touchdowns are ugly?
Make it make sense.
Maybe the Eagles should take the movement to outlaw the Tush Push as a compliment. It‘s compelling, and maybe not entirely coincidental, that the last time a sport changed its rules to diminish dominance it also was because of a Philadelphian.
Wilt Chamberlain’s excellence led basketball to widen the three-second lane and alter rules regarding goaltending, inbounding the ball, and shooting free throws.
Wilt was the greatest big man of all time.
At least the Birds are in good company.