This is the kind of moment you have to savor, not only in the NFL but in life. It’s such a Halley’s Comet rarity that common sense prevails and some tangible bit of human creation survives the overwhelming squeeze of one unhappy billionaire after another.
For weeks we have been led to believe that the tush push will not survive another humorless, profit-obsessed firing squad after a horrid stretch of time in which the Green Bay Packers’ anti-push proposal was worked and polished for a beheading. The whole thing bore resemblance to some town politico shutting down a thriving local business and claiming it had to do with an obscure ordinance from the 1830s (when in reality they just want to put up a Wawa). The inevitability was not just bad for the Philadelphia Eagles and bad for football. It was also bad for creativity and the natural human inclination to find color where there was previously concrete. To find flexibility in a space narrower than the gap between one’s back teeth.
This feeling of inevitability was no accident. The NFL wanted the play gone because it flew way too close to the sun. It was run frequently, it caused temper tantrums among the owner class whose teams are unable to stop it and it is wholly unattractive at a time when the league’s content, fantasy and gambling engines have committed a hostile takeover of the steering wheel à la Michael De Santa in Grand Theft Auto V. God bless the Eagles for having a 26-minute clip of tush pushes ready to post on YouTube the second the play’s legality was left alone for 2025, perhaps in an effort to show via the hundreds of thousands of views it will amass, that we can appreciate a moment that isn’t some serotonin-exploding, 70-yard touchdown pass. We can appreciate the act of getting very, very good at something incredibly minute and unsexy and utilize that skill set to change the world.
On a practical note and a positive one for the NFL, the league can now momentarily back itself out of the murky business of play legislation. While there should always be an effort to ban actions or movements that have a proven track record of causing injury, banning one merely out of fear that it will one day cause an injury is an incredibly dangerous precedent to set. Depending on how vocal the Eagles would want to be in 2025, legislating the push out of the game would place an undue burden on an officiating crew that is already gasping for air on a play-by-play basis—imagine, for example, a fake pushing scenario, or any number of receiver collisions in the backfield of a screen play in which it appears a player may have been pushed to gain separation from a defender. It would also underscore the fact that Jalen Hurts is so thick, strong and perfectly apportioned for this exact play that there are many times when the push itself is not really helping him at all, making this winter and spring of madness all for naught.
In addition, how many strange mutations of the play that actually may cause injury would develop in its absence?
A final thought before I return to shameless grandstanding: The play was always going to die on its own and the league needed to become comfortable with that idea, which it will now do. Hurts is either going to win another Super Bowl, secure his legacy and decide he doesn’t feel like sticking his neck into a human meat grinder 11 times a game, the Eagles’ offensive line is going to age out of this stretch of dominance or Hurts will move on to retirement or another club, making the play as nonsensical for Philadelphia as it would be the Kansas City Chiefs with a different body type under center.
Seeing teams such as the Baltimore Ravens (John Harbaugh), Detroit Lions (Dan Campbell), New England Patriots (Mike Vrabel) and New York Jets (Aaron Glenn) side with the integrity of the play should have told the remaining owners voting all they needed to know. Seeing Jason Kelce, who would have more reason than any human being on the planet to oppose the tush push after hundreds of them landed on his backside and smushed his vertebrae, lobby for its continuation should have been the hint. Those who have actual ties to the heart of the game, those who played or who successfully operate a franchise rooted in traditionalism believe in either the play itself or the ability to come up with one just like it. They have all seen the game mature organically into this televised behemoth via the fine line of meddling without deletion. Modernizing while maintaining the spirit of the whole thing.
We need the tush push not because we need more one-yard plays in the NFL. We need it because we need to believe that there’s always a solution; that there is always the possibility to make something great out of seemingly incongruent parts. We also need to know that sometimes these solutions can withstand the test of time, the test of bureaucracy, the test of faux outrage and the test of whatever you might call that feeling when you know the CEO of your company is talking about you on the phone as he stares lifelessly at you through the glass cubicle in your office.
Today, the NFL was good and reasonable. That makes it a day worth remembering.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as The Tush Push’s Survival Is a Win for Eagles and America.
