Eagles’ Tush Push Isn’t In NFL Crosshairs For 2026 But No Promises For Future

phoenix – The Tush Push witch hunt that made last year’s NFL annual meeting all about pithy conversations between NFL royalty showed how hypocritical the NFL office can be when it wants to be, and plenty of NFL people admitted that if you can’t beat ’em, get ’em banned, that’s out of the question at this year’s meeting.

This year’s NFL owners’ meetings kicked off here Sunday, and Tush Push is not on the agenda, it won’t be discussed, and it’s not on anyone’s lips; That includes Philadelphia Eagles coach Nick Sirianni.

Sirianni, who privately feels a strong connection to the play, is publicly guarded in predicting that it will not be re-examined in the future.

“I don’t know, you’re taking 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 have a lot of thoughts about it. We’re going to play by the rules of whatever we have to be able to do from every angle.”

McKay: People Still Worried About Tush Push

So the league is in a very different place compared to a year ago When the Green Bay Packers proposed banning the play, the NFL office secretly worked to make it happen, and practically every team in the NFC that knew whether it would have to defend against the play on the field cast their off-field votes to ban the Eagles’ signature play.

But this year nothing happened. Tush Push is alive and perhaps the debate over the game is over.

“I don’t know if that’s the end of the debate, because I think there are still people who are interested in that whole driving element,” said Rich McKay, co-chairman of the NFL Competition Committee. “But I can tell you that, just as I told you last year, there was no proposal from the Competition Committee on Tush Push last year, and there was no proposal on this the year before.

“And over the years, we’ve seen the Tush Push decline. The percentage of games, or I should say the number, in which it’s used is decreasing. The success rate in the traditional sneak play is above the Tush Push success rate. So I think there’s less talk about it in the football community and there was no proposal this year to put anything on the table to deal with it.”

This, of course, explains why the Tush Push isn’t that big of a deal this year. But this is more of a snapshot from instamatic (see, Gen Z) than a portrait.

Bills quarterback Josh Allen picks up 1 yard for a first down on a hard push play during halftime action at Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park on Sept. 23, 2024.

Landscape Changed with Tush Push

To fill in the extra pixels, it should be understood that while it is true that the Competition Committee did not make any recommendations regarding the game last year, McKay was against it and the committee ultimately supported banning the game.

League officials, and perhaps even down to commissioner Roger Goodell, favored banning the Tush Push. Goodell has repeatedly mentioned health and safety concerns regarding the game, although there is no health and safety data to present as evidence.

There are a few more reasons why Tush Push continues to exist.

Sean McDermott Went on as coach of the Buffalo Bills and he, and thus his team, was an ardent opponent of Tush Push last year. The Bills were one of two AFC teams to vote to effectively ban the Tush Push, and subsequently He used the Tush Push in his offensive repertoire throughout the season.

The Green Bay Packers are still around. However, club president Mark Murphy, who led the team’s efforts to ban the Tush Push, has retired. Another clear plus for Tush Push.

We must remember that nearly half of the NFL was ready to vote in favor of banning the Tush Push at last year’s annual meeting. But that didn’t reach the three-quarters plateau the measure needed.

So the NFL decided to avoid defeat by pre-empting the votes by never taking the vote. The vote was tabled at meetings in late March and the matter was postponed to another league meeting in May.

NFL’s Efforts Fall Short

In years past, moving issues to the next meeting was a tool the NFL used to win the day, as the May meeting allowed league personnel 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; The vote was 22-10 in favor of the ban. Only one NFC team other than the Eagles voted to continue the game:

Detroit Lions.

Although the Packers’ initial offer focused on player safety, McKay later admitted that the discussion in the Palm Beach gym veered from player safety to aesthetics.

It’s worth noting that the Eagles weren’t as successful in last season’s game. The Eagles converted more than 81 percent of the time at Tush Push during the 2024 Super Bowl season. This rate decreased to 63.6 percent in 2025.

Suddenly, all the NFC teams that hated the game last spring because it was such a huge headache in 2024 aren’t feeling very motivated to get rid of it anymore.