Hands Off the Tush Push

The quarterback calls, “Hike!”.

The center snaps the football.

Twenty-two unusually large men proceed to hit and shove and crash down upon one another as an offense strives to advance the chains while a defense fights to stop them in their tracks.

With a few exceptions, those are the essential elements of every play of every game of every NFL season.

Hitting. Shoving. Falling. Men and a ball.

Yet, for reasons lacking both rationale and evidence, the purest realization of this Bruegel canvas in motion—with thrashing bodies violently colliding in orchestrated chaos across a hash-marked field—has been condemned. Condemned by the fans, condemned by the media, condemned by members of the league.

Some call the play the “Tush Push”; some call it the “Brotherly Shove”; some call it the “Cheek Sneak”. Others, like famed sportswriter Peter King, in his unmitigated revulsion, draw upon the language of Solomon and David to denounce the play with Biblical consequence, terming it an “abomination”.

So what is this abominable crime against sport?!

Ain’t nothing but a QB sneak. Only, in the variation popularized by the Philadelphia Eagles, the quarterback gets pushed forward from behind by a couple of teammates, usually a tight end and running back, hence the Tush Push.

Now, were this sentence being written approximately two decades ago, King’s “abomination” critique would hold water and the previous 230 words—title included—would be rendered moot. However, since the NFL struck the rule which prohibited pushing offensive players in 2005, King is fresh out of a point!

So, why do he and many others want to see the Tush Push abolished? Well, for some people it just isn’t pretty enough.

“I don’t think when the fathers of football invented this game, they invented it so that two or three guys can push somebody from behind and try to help them gain yards,” explained King before sardonically lauding the beauty of the play in an appearance on the 94WIP Midday Show.

Former NFL Vice President of Officiating and current rules analyst for Fox Sports Dean Blandino concurs. “It amounts to a rugby scrum,” dismissed Blandino on The33rdTeam.com. “The NFL wants to showcase the athleticism and skill of our athletes. This is just not a skillful play. This is just a tactic that is not an aesthetically pleasing play.”

Even Washington Commanders defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio echoes their complaints. “I think it’s a nice rugby play,” he said. “It’s [just] not what we’re looking for in football.”

First things first: sincerest apologies to the half-a-billion rugby fans and players around the globe for Blandino’s comments on “skill”. Such an argument ignores a) the talent of rugby players and b) the success the Eagles have enjoyed running the play. It also dismisses other teams’ inability to effectively implement the Push.

The Eagles have gained yardage on 16 of 17 attempted Tush Pushes through six weeks of football not because the play is cheap or easy but because they have the necessary personnel. Quarterback Jalen Hurts is capable of squatting 600 pounds (the weight of your average male grizzly bear); their center, Jason Kelce, is a future Hall of Famer; their offensive line is the best in football.

Even Cowboys defensive end Micah Parsons, star of the Eagles’ biggest rival, agrees. “I honestly just think [the Eagles] have the team to do the Tush Push,” he said on his Bleacher Report podcast, The Edge. “We stopped New England when they tried [the Push]…[so] it’s not up to the league to say, ‘Just because you can’t stop it, we have to take it away.’”

In short, if it weren’t skillful, everybody would be pushing tushes with the 94% success rate of the Eagles. And furthermore, when did incorporating ideas from rugby into American football become anathema? When did “aesthetic appeal” become sacrosanct?

From the oval-shaped ball and endzone goalposts to tackling, passing, and the line of scrimmage, Walter Camp—the founding father of American football—created the game as a variation of rugby, and in neither sport has visual dynamism ever been a barometer of skillfulness or strategic genius. The QB sneak has never been pretty, and one would be hard-pressed to call Tom Brady’s renowned sneak a showcase of freak athleticism. Still, he holds the record for most QB sneaks since 2001, and nobody fought to ban Brady’s scrum-like dive then.

If the game were confined to only that which the founding fathers could have conceived (though the Tush Push is consistent with the original conception of the game), American football wouldn’t be what it is today.

The Founders never imagined the two-point conversion which wasn’t adopted by the NFL until 1994. They likely never imagined the uprights being planted in the back of the end zone rather than on the goal line, which was the case until 1974. And somehow they consider helmets until the 1920s, yet even then, Stormtroopers—who are incapacitated by teddy bears with sticks—had better head protection.

Perhaps King and other naysayers criticize the Tush Push’s version of football for all the reasons they say, namely because it doesn’t reflect the past of the game. Or perhaps the Tush Push, in its deployment of a brute force scrum, is simply too reminiscent of a more violent era of football which prohibited forward passing and was nearly abolished by Teddy Roosevelt because of the death toll it accumulated—a version the contemporary NFL increasingly distances itself from as their own GOAT disparages their product for resembling flag football.

Either way, to argue for the Tush Push’s dismissal from football is wrongheaded because it is football. And there’s no getting around it, or through it.