Ah, another year, another attempt to ban the Philadelphia Eagles’ signature play, the tush push.
That’s right, after riding the play all the way to the Super Bowl, one of the teams Philadelphia concerned, the Green Bay Packers, took that personally and have requested the NFL make the play illegal heading into the 2025 NFL season.
Now granted, for the Eagles, this is nothing new, as other teams have been requesting the play be banned for one reason or another for years now, but this particular request really tubbed safety-turned-ESPN analyst Ryan Clark the wrong way, who took some time on NFL Live to blast the “soft” teams looking to remove the push.
“Also too, how soft do you have to be, ‘Oh, we can’t stop it, our defensive tackles aren’t tough enough, our linebackers get hurt.’ Shut the h*ll up and bow your neck! Somebody get physical and stop the play! And like Mina said, it’s like everything else in sports; if you don’t have the personnel to do it, you actually don’t do it,” Clark declared.
“Trust me, whatever team Matthew Stafford plays for next year is not implementing the tush push. Don’t even trip, don’t even worry about it, don’t practice it. It’s about understanding who you are playing, practicing, getting in the right gap. Look at the Kansas City Chiefs. The Kansas City Chiefs went into the AFC Championship with an actual plan for the quarterback sneak, with a plan to stop Josh Allen. Not only did they stop the two-point conversion, but they also stopped the fourth down attempt, depending on where you thought the football was. And so to me, to go in there and go, ‘ah, instead of actually coaching, let’s run away from coaching and try to outlaw this play’ is dumb, and it’s soft. And to be honest, when you look at the actual play and the way that they run it, it’s actually more difficult for them to practice it, to do it the amount of time they do, and unless it’s a player health and safety decision, you don’t take it out of the game.”
You know, you really have to give it to Clark on this one; he’s right on the money. While the Eagles have designed a play that is designed to maximize their unique set of personnel, there are teams that have stopped the play and others who have used it effectively, too, in their own game planning. If other teams wanted to run the play, they could get their quarterback squatting in the weights room and invest heavily in a top-5 offensive line that can move the ball a few yards based on sheer effort.
Will the tush push eventually be banned? Maybe, if enough franchises decide to get on that bandwagon, but as Clark pointed out, such a move would be compensating for poor coaching, not some unfair competitive advantage created by the Eagles’ favorite short-yardage run play.
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