Stephen Holder
THE ATLANTA FALCONS, protecting a 7-3 lead, faced a fourth-and-1 at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ 47 with 9:03 left in the first half of their Week 1 matchup.
For the Philadelphia Eagles, the playcall would have been automatic: the tush push. And the result would have been nearly automatic: a first down. They’ve converted the play 96.6% of the time in fourth-and-1 scenarios since 2022. It has become so unstoppable that nearly two-thirds of NFL teams voted to ban it.
But Falcons coach Raheem Morris is no fan of the tush push, questioning its legality and wanting it banned. So instead, he called for a handoff to star running back Bijan Robinson, who was stopped for no gain. The Bucs scored on the ensuing possession en route to a 23-20 NFC South victory.
“There’s just no other play in our game where you can absolutely get behind somebody and push them,” Morris said. “I never really understood it, why that was legal. So, I’ve definitely been one of those guys voting against that.”
Morris is not alone in his skepticism. Only nine teams have run the play 10 or more times since 2022. Four teams — the New Orleans Saints, Washington Commanders, Carolina Panthers and Miami Dolphins — have never attempted one.
Even the Indianapolis Colts under Shane Steichen, who was at the forefront of implementing the play when he was with the Eagles, have attempted push plays just three times since he was hired in Indianapolis in 2023. None of those attempts produced a first down.
The play is as simple as it is effective. At a basic level for the Eagles, it involves quarterback Jalen Hurts taking the snap and diving forward behind a powerful offensive line while being pushed from behind by teammates lined up in the offensive backfield.
The Eagles have attempted it 116 times since 2022, including six times in Sunday’s victory over the Kansas City Chiefs. That tied for the most attempts by the Eagles in a single game. And it was juxtaposed against the Chiefs’ failure on a critical third-quarter fourth-and-1 play in which running back Kareem Hunt was stuffed after a handoff.
The NFL is often described as the ultimate copycat league, so why don’t more teams try to duplicate the Eagles’ signature play? The league average success rate for a fourth-and-1 non-tush play is 67.0% since 2022, while the league average for a tush push is 84.8%. And the Eagles’ rate is nearly 12 points higher, but the teams opposed to the play have a variety of objections, including avoiding injury risk to quarterbacks or not having personnel ideally suited to running the play. Meanwhile, the Eagles keep pushing along, and it’s not sitting well with some teams, including Chiefs coach Andy Reid, who accused Eagles linemen of false starts.
“We’ve tried it at other places, and it’s not the same replication that it is in Philly,” said Saints coach Kellen Moore, who was the Eagles’ offensive coordinator this past season. “They’re the ones that are doing it, and all of us have tried to replicate it in some way. And, usually, at the end of the day, it’s their play.”
The Eagles’ dominance hasn’t been well received by everyone. The Green Bay Packers proposed banning the play, but that proposal narrowly failed during contentious league meetings in May. There are still many vocal proponents of banning it, with the measure falling just two votes short of passage. But, for now, the only thing standing between the Eagles and more successful tush push plays are NFL defenses. And those defenses have yet to devise reliable ways to stop them.
“There’s some secret ingredient that they got going on over there compared to everybody else,” Colts defensive tackle DeForest Buckner said.
STEICHEN REMEMBERS VIVIDLY the revelatory moment when he discovered the tush push might become a go-to tactic.
He was Philadelphia’s playcaller on Oct. 9, 2022, when the Eagles included the current version of the play in their game plan for the first time (they had used a variant of it sparingly in 2021). It was originally intended to be one of several short-yardage plays in their offensive catalogue.
With 8:06 remaining in the first quarter of that day’s game against the Arizona Cardinals, the Eagles faced a first-and-goal from the Cardinals’ 1-yard line. It was an ideal scenario to roll out their newest play. Worst case, the Eagles would have additional chances to convert if the experiment failed.
Ultimately, those fears were unfounded.
Hurts, behind a surge from his offensive line — and with tight end Dallas Goedert pulling Hurts from the front and running back Kenneth Gainwell pushing him from behind — barreled across the goal line for the first points of the game.
“We hit the first one, and I’m like, ‘All right, that was pretty nice, let’s do it again,'” Steichen said. “And, so, we did it again. I don’t even know how many times we ran it in that one game.”
All told, the Eagles attempted the play six times in the victory over Arizona. They converted first downs on five of those attempts.
That was the day everything changed.
The play became the singular focus of the Eagles’ short-yardage offense. The offensive coaching staff routinely held weekly 90-minute meetings about short-yardage situations before employing the tush push, Steichen said. But the instant success of the push play reduced those meetings to about 10 minutes.
“We’d look at each other and say, ‘So, are we good?'” Steichen said. “If there wasn’t anything else, we’d just say, ‘All right, we’re done.'”
The staff began adding layers to the play, like drawing up alternative plays they could run out of the tush push formation. Eventually they added a second pusher in the backfield after initially drawing up the play with just one. But mostly, coaches were inclined to not fix something that wasn’t broken.
Since 2022, other teams have had ample opportunity to duplicate the play. But only the Bills have used it with any regularity, converting 51 out of 57 attempts — with any down and distance — for an 89.5% success rate. The Chicago Bears (16 attempts) are the next closest team.
Are the Eagles just smarter? More talented? Tougher? It’s much more nuanced than that.
Not surprisingly, the offensive line plays the most fundamental role in a successful tush push. Without a powerful unit capable of creating significant upfront push, the play isn’t even viable. And yet, four of the top five teams in run block win rate from 2024 never attempted a push play this past season. The fifth, the Baltimore Ravens, tried it just five times.
So, having a formidable line does not automatically make a team a good candidate to run this play. You have to have the right personnel with the right skill sets. The ability of the interior offensive linemen to create significant push and get lower than the defensive linemen in the scrum is key. Now-retired Eagles center Jason Kelce was particularly good at this.
“You’ve just got to have the perfect technique,” Tennessee Titans center Lloyd Cushenberry III said.
BUT THERE ARE other factors to consider, even for teams with top offensive lines.
Take Washington, for example. The Commanders were third in the NFL this past season in rushing yards per game and ranked second in collective run block win rate. But their slender rookie quarterback, Jayden Daniels (6-foot-4, 210 pounds), is not as powerfully built as Hurts, who is a compact 6-1 and 223 pounds and famously squats nearly 600 pounds.
“I’m assuming they don’t want me to do it,” Daniels said of the Commanders’ aversion to the play. “I guess that’s the reason why. If I need to do it, I’ll do it.”
Therein lies another component of this equation: It is Hurts’ lower-body strength and overall power combined with the Eagles’ skilled offensive line that makes it all come together.
In Jacksonville, new Jaguars coach Liam Coen said he has included the tush push in the playbook in part because of 6-6, 220-pound quarterback Trevor Lawrence. But Coen admits to never considering it in his previous role as Tampa Bay Buccaneers offensive coordinator with smaller quarterback Baker Mayfield (6-1, 215).
“We didn’t do a ton of [quarterback] sneaks because Baker was not the biggest, even though he’d probably bust my chops for saying that,” Coen said. “But he can get them, too, though. It’ll be a part of the [Jaguars’] scheme.”
To that end, Seattle Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald said he might consider using the tush push with rookie quarterback Jalen Milroe, who showed himself to be a powerful runner at Alabama. The Seahawks successfully executed one in the preseason with Milroe under center and could deploy it again.
“You’ve seen him,” Macdonald said. “He’s a strong person.”
Instead, the Seahawks ran one with tight end AJ Barner on Sunday against the Steelers, and they converted.
There’s a final variable to consider, and it’s also related to the quarterback: instincts.
Hurts has developed such a knack for finding the openings in that split second after the snap on push plays that it has made him difficult to stop. In that 2022 game when the Eagles attempted the tush push for the first time, the hole Hurts attempted to push through never materialized. But he ably slid slightly to his left and found an alternative path to the end zone.
“The quarterback has to have a tremendous feel for it,” Steichen said.
Some have that, some don’t.
Los Angeles Rams coach Sean McVay makes no pretense about which category his quarterback, Matthew Stafford, falls into.
“We always joke, he’s a terrible sneaker,” McVay said. He added, “You won’t be seeing much tush push from the L.A. Rams.”
THERE ARE SOME in NFL circles who are opposed to the tush push on principle because of the pushing element. Many of those individuals participated in those heated debates earlier in the year.
But there are coaches who choose not to run the play based on mere philosophy. For them, there are other ways to gain a single yard in a short-yardage scenario.
“We don’t live in that world,” Kansas City Chiefs offensive coordinator Matt Nagy said. “Schematically, we feel we have our own ways of getting to that quarterback sneak, even if it’s not that play.”
The Chiefs have in recent years employed tight ends on standard quarterback sneaks, using pre-snap shifts to move them under center. Three-time MVP Patrick Mahomes had a right patellar (kneecap) dislocation on a sneak in 2019 and missed two games, which likely influenced the team’s philosophy. The Chiefs’ short-yardage approach has been relatively successful as they ranked 16th this past season in converting third and fourth downs with a yard or less to go for a first down (71.7%).
Dallas Cowboys coach Brian Schottenheimer has a similar view.
“We have different ways of what I would say attacking the A-gaps and things like that,” he said. “And we have some plays that we feel like we’ve perfected that are different than that.”
Another obstacle, some say, is the inability to safely replicate the play in practice. Even Steichen admitted calling the tush push as often as the Eagles did is what helped them perfect it — not practice. Some coaches are understandably reluctant to call a play they haven’t adequately rehearsed.
“We’re obviously not going to create a bunch of scrums on the practice field with our own defense and risk injuries,” New England Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels said.
The Eagles are proof that the best way to improve at running the play is to run it more often. But you can only afford to do so if it’s actually working.
“It’s about them doing it over and over and over again,” Steichen said. “They’re getting the reps on the field on game day, and that’s their practice — doing it.”
A final philosophical objection might be one of the most obvious: Not every team wants to subject its quarterback to potential punishment. It’s a different question from whether the quarterback is actually good at running the tush push. Hurts inevitably gets hit on the play, even though it hasn’t resulted in an injury for the reigning Super Bowl MVP.
Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray’s position on the concept is simple: Count me out. And he told former Arizona coach Kliff Kingsbury as much.
Murray recalled running a quarterback sneak early in his career against the Falcons. He converted the first down, he said, but defenders were in the pile “f—ing with my fingers and messing with me and stuff. I told Kliff … ‘Yo, I’m not doing that s— again.’ But I would do it if we needed to do it. I would definitely do it.”
Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores said “exposing the quarterback” to injury is, in his estimation, the biggest reason more teams don’t run the tush push.
“It’s a violent play, I would say,” he said. “There’s certainly a lot of contact on that particular play.”
Colts center Tanor Bortolini was recently discussing the idea of a tush push with quarterback Daniel Jones, formerly of the New York Giants. Jones’ position was unambiguous.
“In New York, he said they ran it one time and he got smoked by a linebacker,” Bortolini said. “He was like, ‘I never want to run that again.’ And I was like, ‘You know what? That makes sense.’
“You really hate to put your quarterback in a spot where he can just get drilled like that.”
THERE REMAINS SIGNIFICANT opposition to the tush push. During the May league meeting, 22 teams voted for the Packers’ proposal to ban it (passage required 24 votes). That means roughly two out of three owners were convinced the play is worth eliminating.
League officials posited that it’s a dangerous play and should be removed from the game.
“I think we owe it to our players,” Green Bay Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst said. “It’s not about success, it’s about safety here.”
1:23
Schefter: ‘Eagles have mastered the tush push’
Adam Schefter explains how the Eagles have mastered the tush push, leaving defenses and officials unsure how to manage it.
There was also criticism in the Eagles’ game Sunday, with Fox analyst Tom Brady and Reid suggesting Eagles offensive linemen were getting off the line of scrimmage before the snap but weren’t penalized.
“If guys are moving early, then you’ve got to call that,” Reid said. “[The league] will go back and look at that and see what their evaluation is of it. It could be different than mine. I felt like the guys [were] moving, and that’s why I was griping about it on the sideline with the officials.
“But sometimes people see things differently. I’ll be curious to see what the response is.”
Eagles coach Nick Sirianni said of the Chiefs, “I would argue that they were in the neutral zone a lot and taking every inch that they had.” Still, the questions might create renewed scrutiny of the play.
But, for now, the play is perfectly legal and is available to every team. And yet, there is minimal momentum toward wider usage.
In Week 1 of this season, just two teams ran a tush push of any sort. To no surprise, it was the same teams that have long been doing it successfully: the Eagles and the Bills (two attempts each).
It’s just the latest evidence of what has been clear all along: The rest of the league still hasn’t cracked this code, and the Eagles, in particular, stand alone.
“I can’t hate that they mastered it,” Titans defensive tackle Sebastian Joseph-Day said. “Shout[out] to their coach, shout[out] to their players. They just got it down. They got it down to the T.”
Contributing: Todd Archer, Sarah Barshop, Turron Davenport, Rob Demovsky, Mike DiRocco, Brady Henderson, John Keim, Marc Raimondi, Mike Reiss, Kevin Seifert, Nate Taylor, Katherine Terrell and Josh Weinfuss.
