From The Morning Call: https://tinyurl.com/4d7tat7y
PHILADELPHIA — The tush push took a beating on Sunday.
While the Eagles won the game in Kansas City, we all saw they may have lost their signature play.
Days were already numbered for the tush push, which the league tried twice to outlaw last spring, ultimately falling just two votes shy of the 75% threshold among owners.
Sunday’s telecast was a designed ambush by the NFL and FOX — cohorts enjoined in a lucrative, gluttonous partnership — to get rid of the tush push.
It was an oily plot hatched months ahead. In fact, I’d bet the exact date of its conception was May 22, the morning after the vote came up short.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who has spent his tenure trying to legislate more passing, wants the play gone. Lots of teams and fans do, too. They’ve tried to claim it’s unsafe, which there’s zero data to support. They’ve tried to claim it’s “not a football play,” that it’s more like rugby, but apparently they don’t know the origins of American football or what the game was like before the proliferation of the forward pass.
Grantland Rice’s famous symbolism of the “four horsemen of the Apocalypse” was about a backfield of three running backs and a running quarterback.
The fact is, its detractors don’t like the aesthetics of the play. More importantly, other teams can’t figure out how to stop it or run it correctly themselves. So they say it’s an unfair advantage. But how would banning it be fair to a team that developed a play catered to its strengths?
The Buffalo Bills run a version of it, but they don’t have the right personnel — the league’s most powerful O-line and a quarterback who can squat 600 pounds — or the properly practiced technique. The Bills and coach Sean McDermott favored abolishing it.
If we want to inject some honesty into the conversation, the real reason the league doesn’t like the tush push comes down to two words: sour grapes.
“I think it’s an exciting play,” Eagles coach Nick Sirianni said Monday. “I mean obviously there’s been a lot of discussion about it, and I think when you bring more discussion about a play, it brings more attention to football. I think it’s kind of a cool thing how much people debate it, how much people discuss it.
“I always think there’s a beauty when everyone knows what you’re going to run, and isn’t that football? They know exactly what’s coming and they either can stop it or can’t stop it.”
If you don’t believe in my collusion theory, guess who was sitting together at the game: Goodell and FOX Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch.
Granted, the Eagles uncanned the tush push seven times, which was three or for more times than usual, and it wasn’t pretty. Then again, football often isn’t pretty. Most NFL games are slogs decided by two possessions or less.
Moreover, in a tag-team effort with the aid of ultra-slow motion, the broadcasters pointed out that two Eagles guards fired early when quarterback Jalen Hurts reached the end zone on the glorified sneak in the fourth quarter. (Never mind that he clearly scored the play before and the Eagles weren’t credited, despite a supposed replay review.) That’s when the refrain ramped up about the tush push being “too hard to officiate.”
The Eagles have been running the play since 2022, yet suddenly the league is calling it “too hard to officiate.” That line echoed throughout the broadcast, reminiscent of a coordinated political media blitz — like WMD in Iraq: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
“It’s too hard to officiate.” “It’s too hard to officiate.” “It’s too hard to officiate.”
Kevin Burkhardt and Tom Brady repeated the phrase in the booth. Dean Blandino, FOX’s in-game rules analyst, repeated it. Blandino, in between snacks in the green room, figuratively threw his hands up in exasperation in the game’s final moments, when Kansas City claimed to recover a fumble after Hurts was already ruled down.
“I’m done with the tush push, guys. It’s too hard to officiate,” Blandino proclaimed.
The game aired the same night as the Emmys. Maybe that’s what he and the cast were going for.
Or perhaps the NFL just needs more competent refs?
“Too hard to officiate” is the language the league will use to kill the tush push next offseason. It sold its spin Sunday, and the following day sports media talking heads were regurgitating the phrase, too.
“I think that the one clip I saw of it was slowed down so much that I’m not sure you can see that to the naked eye,” Sirianni said of the goal-line play. “I get how we can manipulate things and show things like that, but it was slowed down so much it was like (gesturing a tick, tick, tick of a clock), right? But we understand that we have to be perfect on that play and we’ll keep working on being perfect on that play.
“There’s things they do too on defense that sometimes you can’t see to the naked eye all the time. Someone shared that (false start) clip with me … You could do that with a lot of plays in football and slow it down. … You see that sometimes with pass interference, too.
Ironically, with all this mention of collusion and FOX, when President Donald Trump welcomed the Eagles to the White House in April to celebrate their Super Bowl LIX championship, he expressed support of the tush push: “I hope they keep that play. … They’re talking about getting rid of that play, I understand. They should keep it. … I like it, it’s sort of exciting and different.”
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Christiaan DeFranco covers the Eagles for MediaNews Group. Email him at cdefranco@medianewsgroup.com. Follow him on X at @the_defranc.