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PHOENIX – The Tush Push witch hunt that set up last year’s NFL annual meeting over terse exchanges between NFL royalty showed how disingenuous the NFL office can be when it wants to be, and led several NFL people to admit that if you can’t beat ’em, get ’em banned, that’s not a thing at this year’s meeting.
This year’s NFL owners’ meetings began here Sunday and the Tush Push is not on the agenda, will not be discussed and is not on anyone’s lips, including Philadelphia Eagles coach Nick Sirianni.
Sirianni, who privately feels a strong connection to the play, is publicly wary of predicting that the play will not come under renewed scrutiny.
“I don’t know, you take one step at a time,” Sirianni said Monday morning. “It’s not something I need to think about right now. So, I guess I don’t really have a lot of ideas about it. We’ll play by the rules of whatever we need to be able to do in every aspect.”
NEW ORLEANS, LA – FEBRUARY 09: Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts (1) scores a touchdown on a tush rush during Super Bowl LIX between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs on February 9, 2025 at the Superdome in New Orleans, LA. (Photo by Andy Lewis/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
McKay: People are still concerned about Tush Push
So the league finds itself in quite a different situation than a year ago, when the Green Bay Packers proposed that the play be banned, then the NFL office surreptitiously worked to make it happen, and virtually every team in the NFC that knew whether to defend against the play on the field used their off-the-field vote to ban the Eagles’ iconic play.
But this year, well, nothing. The Tush Push lives on and perhaps the debate over the play is over.
“I don’t know if this is the end of the debate, because I think there are still people who are concerned about the whole push element,” said Rich McKay, co-chairman of the NFL’s competition committee. “But I will tell you, just like I told you last year, there was no proposal from the competition committee last year on the Tush Push, there was no proposal the year before on that.
“And over the years, we’ve seen that the Tush Push is on the decline. The percentage, or should I say the number of plays that it’s used on, is decreasing. The success rate of the traditional sneak is higher than the success rate of the Tush Push. So, I just think it’s less talked about within the football community, and there haven’t been any proposals on the table to put anything this year to address this issue.”
This, of course, explains why the Tush Push isn’t a big deal this year. But it’s a snapshot of an instamatic (look it up, Gen Z) rather than a portrait.
Bills quarterback Josh Allen gets the 1-yarder for a first down on the push play during the first half at Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park on September 23, 2024.
The landscape has changed with Tush Push
And to fill in the extra pixels, we must understand that although it is true that the competition committee did not make any proposals on the piece last year, McKay was against it and the committee ultimately preferred to ban the piece.
League officials all the way up to Commissioner Roger Goodell, perhaps, preferred that the Tush Push be banned. Goodell consistently mentioned his health and safety concerns regarding the play, even though there was no health and safety data to present as evidence.
There are a few other reasons why the Tush Push endures.
Sean McDermott is no longer the coach of the Buffalo Bills and he – and his team by extension – were a staunch opponent of the Tush Push last year. The Bills were one of only two teams in the AFC to vote to actually ban the Tush Push – and then use the Tush Push in their offensive repertoire during the season.
The Green Bay Packers are still here. But club president Mark Murphy, who led that team’s effort to get the Tush Push banned, has retired. So another clear plus for the Tush Push.
Recall that about half of the NFL was ready to vote in favor of banning the tush push at last year’s annual meeting. But this did not reach the three-quarters plateau required by the measure.
The NFL, after holding votes beforehand, decided to avoid defeat by never voting. The vote was taken at those meetings in late March and the matter was deferred to another league meeting in May.
NFL efforts against failed
In recent years, pushing issues to the next meeting had been a tool used by the NFL to win the day, as the May meeting allowed league staff to pressure owners in favor of their measures, knowing that coaches and general managers would not attend the next meeting.
In May, the proposal was still two votes short, 22 votes to 10 in favor of a ban. Only one NFC team, other than the Eagles, voted to keep the game going:
Detroit Lions.
While the Packers’ initial proposal focused on player safety, McKay later admitted that the discussion in the Palm Beach room was moving away from player safety and toward aesthetics.
It’s worth noting that the Eagles weren’t as successful last season. During their 2024 Super Bowl season, the Eagles converted over 81% of the time on the Tush Push. This percentage fell to 63.6 percent in 2025.
Suddenly, all the NFC teams that hated this game last spring because it was a huge headache in 2024 don’t feel as motivated to get rid of it now.
