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PHOENIX – The Tush Push witch hunt that made last year’s NFL annual meeting all about pithy exchanges between NFL royalty showed how deceitful the NFL front office can be when it wants to, and several NFL people admitted that if you can’t beat them, banning them isn’t 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, and that includes Philadelphia Eagles coach Nick Sirianni.
Sirianni, who privately feels a strong connection to the work, is publicly cautious about predicting that the work will be free from renewed future scrutiny.
“I don’t know, you have to take it one step at a time,” Sirianni said Monday morning. “It’s not something I have to think about right now. So I guess I don’t really have too many thoughts about it. We’ll play by the rules of whatever we need to be able to do across the board.”
NEW ORLEANS, LA – FEBRUARY 9: Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts (1) scores a touchdown on a shove during Super Bowl LIX between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs on February 9, 2025 at the Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Photo by Andy Lewis/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
McKay: People are still worried about Tush push
So the league is in quite a different place than it was a year ago when the Green Bay Packers proposed banning the play, then the NFL front office surreptitiously worked to make that happen, and virtually every NFC team that knew whether to defend against the play on the field used their off-field vote to ban the Eagles’ signature play.
But this year nothing. The Tush Push lives on and perhaps the debate over the work is over.
“I don’t know if it’s the end of the debate, because I think there are still people who are concerned about the whole element of pressure,” said NFL Competition Committee co-chairman Rich McKay. “But I would tell you that, as 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 going down. The percentage, or should I say the number of plays that it’s used on, is going down. The success rate on the traditional sneak is above the success rate of the Tush Push. So, I just think it’s talked about less within the football community, and there wasn’t any proposal on the table to put something in this year to deal with it.”
This, of course, is one explanation for why the Tush Push isn’t a big deal this year. But it’s a snapshot of a snapshot (look it up, Generation Z) rather than a portrait.
Bills quarterback Josh Allen gets the 1-yard line for a first down on the push play during first-half action at Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park on Sept. 23, 2024.
The panorama has changed with Tush Push
And to fill in the extra pixels, one must understand that while it is true that the Competition Committee made no proposal on the work last year, McKay was against it and the committee was ultimately in favor of banning the work.
League officials, perhaps even Commissioner Roger Goodell, preferred that the Tush Push be banned. Goodell consistently raised health and safety concerns regarding the work even though there was no health and safety data to present as evidence.
There are a couple of other reasons why Tush Push is still alive.
Sean McDermott stepped down as coach of the Buffalo Bills and he (and his team, by extension) were a fervent opponent of the Tush Push last year. The Bills were one of only two AFC teams to vote to effectively ban the Tush Push and then use the Tush Push in their offensive repertoire during the season.
The Green Bay Packers still exist. But club president Mark Murphy, who led that team’s effort to ban the Tush Push, backed out. So another net plus for the Tush Push.
We should remember that about half of the NFL was willing to vote to ban the Tush Push at last year’s annual meeting. But that didn’t reach the three-quarters level the measure needed.
So the NFL, having flogged the votes beforehand, decided to avoid defeat by never participating in the vote. The vote was postponed during those meetings in late March and the issue was postponed to another league meeting in May.
NFL’s counter effort fell short
In previous years, bringing issues to the next meeting had been a tool the NFL used to win the day because the May meeting allowed league staff to lobby owners for their actions, knowing that coaches and general managers would not attend the next meeting.
The May proposal was still two votes short, 22-10 in favor of the ban. Only one NFC team other than the Eagles voted to keep the play:
The Detroit Lions.
While the Packers’ initial proposal focused on player safety, McKay later admitted that the discussion in the Palm Beach room moved away from player safety toward aesthetics.
It’s worth noting that the Eagles didn’t have as much success with the play last season. In their 2024 Super Bowl season, the Eagles converted more than 81 percent of the time on the Tush Push. That percentage dropped to 63.6 percent in 2025.
Suddenly, all those NFC teams that hated this play last spring because it was a huge headache in 2024 don’t feel as motivated to get rid of it now.
