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PHOENIX – The Tush Push witch hunt that turned last year’s NFL Annual Meeting into terse exchanges among NFL royalty showed how duplicitous the NFL front office can be when it wants to, and led several NFL people to admit that if you can’t beat ’em, get ’em banned, there’s nothing at this year’s meeting.
This year’s NFL owners meetings began here on Sunday, and the Tush Push is not on the agenda, will not be debated, and is not on anyone’s lips, and that includes Philadelphia Eagles coach Nick Sirianni.
Sirianni, who privately feels a strong connection to the play, is publicly guarded about predicting that the play is free from renewed future scrutiny.
“I don’t know, you 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 a lot of thoughts about it. We’re going to play by the rules of what we have to be able to do in every aspect.”
NEW ORLEANS, LA – FEBRUARY 09: Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts (1) scores a touchdown on a tush push during Super Bowl LIX between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs on February 9, 2025 at the Superdome in New Orleans, LA. (Photo by Andy Lewis/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
McKay: People are still worried about Tush Push
So the league is in a very different place than it was a year ago, when the Green Bay Packers proposed banning the play, the NFL front office worked in secret to make it happen, and virtually every team in the NFC that knew whether to defend against the play on the field used its off-field vote to ban the Eagles’ signature play.
But this year, well, nothing. The Tush Push lives on, and perhaps the debate about the play is over.
“I don’t know that this is the end of the debate, because I think there are still people who are concerned about the whole pushing element,” NFL competition committee co-chairman Rich McKay said. “But I will tell you that like last year, I told you — there was no proposal from the competition committee last year about the Tush Push, there was no proposal the year before about it.
“And over the years now we’ve seen the Tush Push go down. The percentage or should I say the number of plays it’s used on goes down. The success rate of the traditional sneak is over the Tush Push success rate. So I just think there’s less talk about it in the football community and there was no proposal on the table to do anything about it this year.”
This, of course, explains why Tush Push isn’t a big deal this year. But it’s a snapshot from an instamatic (look it up, Gen Z) rather than a portrait.
Bills quarterback Josh Allen gets 1-yard for a first down on the tush push play during first half action at Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park on Sept. 23, 2024.
The landscape has changed at Tush Push
And to fill in the extra pixels, understand that while it’s true that the competition committee made no proposal on the play last year, McKay was against it and the committee ultimately voted to ban the play.
League officials all the way up to maybe even Commissioner Roger Goodell preferred that the Tush Push be banned. Goodell consistently cited his health and safety concerns regarding the play, even though there was no health and safety data to present as evidence.
There are a few more reasons why Tush Push lives on.
Sean McDermott is gone as coach of the Buffalo Bills, and he—and his team by extension—was an ardent 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 used the Tush Push in their offensive repertoire during the season.
The Green Bay Packers still exist. But club president Mark Murphy, who spearheaded the team’s push to have Tush Push banned, backed down. So another net plus for Tush Push.
We should remember that roughly half of the NFL was prepared to vote to ban the Tush Push at last year’s annual meeting. But it didn’t reach the three-fourths plateau it needed to.
So the NFL, whipping votes in advance, decided to avoid defeat by never taking the vote. The vote was tabled during those meetings in late March, and the issue was pushed to another league meeting in May.
NFL effort against fell short
In recent years, pushing 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 in favor of their measures, knowing that coaches and general managers would not attend the next meeting.
The proposal in May was still two votes short, 22-10 for a ban. Only one NFC team, other than the Eagles, voted to keep the game:
Detroit Lions.
While the original proposal by the Packers focused on player safety, McKay later admitted that the discussion in the Palm Beach room veered away from player safety to aesthetics.
It’s worth noting that the Eagles weren’t as successful with the game last season. In their 2024 Super Bowl season, the Eagles converted over 81 percent of the time on the Tush Push. That percentage dropped to 63.6 percent in 2025.
Suddenly, all the NFC teams who hated the play last spring because it was such a headache in 2024 don’t feel quite as motivated to get rid of it now.
