Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts is still going to be able to get a little help from his friends in 2025 whenever his team needs a yard for a first down or a touchdown.
In a surprise result, the NFL owners were unable to get the 75% of the votes needed to ban the tush push Wednesday during the league’s spring meeting in Minneapolis. A total of 24 votes were needed. The vote was 22-10.
In a strange coincidence, that was also the score by which the Eagles beat the Green Bay Packers in the first round of the playoffs last season. The Packers were the team that proposed the ban.
The Eagles, according to a post on X from ESPN’s Adam Schefter, made one final plea to keep the play in the game with the help of former center Jason Kelce. Schefter wrote that Kelce went to Minnesota to “lobby NFL owners as to why they should keep, and not ban, the Tush Push play.”
Dianna Russinni of the The Athletic reported that Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie spoke at length to the owners ahead of Kelce and offered an impassioned defense of why the play should remain.
Lurie laid out a similar case when he spoke to the team’s beat writers in April in Palm Beach, Fla. when he insisted there was no evidence showing that the tush push was a danger to the health of the players. He insisted, in fact, that it was safer than the more conventional quarterback sneak.
“I think for everybody, including myself especially, health and safety is the most important thing when evaluating any play,” Lurie said as the NFL meeting came to a close late Tuesday afternoon. “We’ve been very open to whatever data may exist on the tush push, but there’s just been no data that shows it isn’t a very, very safe play. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be pushing the tush push.”
The owners voted on Packers’ revised proposal to get rid of the play, which was first given to the competition committee in March. A vote was tabled at the NFL Annual Meeting last month because the owners only had 16 votes.
The Eagles first ran the tush push in the fourth quarter of their opening-day win against the Detroit Lions in 2022. Holding a three-point lead late in the game, tight end Dallas Goedert motioned left, stopped behind Hurts and then shoved the quarterback forward for a first down that sealed the victory.
As the weeks wore on, the Eagles started using the tush push more and more during the season with great success and for the last three years it has been the team’s go-to play in one-yard situations.
According to Jay Morrison of SI.com, Hurts has scored 33 of his 55 rushing touchdowns from one-yard out, which is the most by any quarterback in league history. Most of them have been on the tush push.
And now its legacy can continue.
The Eagles downplayed the issue when asked about it Tuesday.
Hurts, in fact, declined to even discuss the play.
“I don’t necessarily have a comment on that,” he said.
A.J. Brown shrugged off the possible ban by saying “it’s only one yard.”
Offensive tackle Jordan Mailata said the Eagles have bigger things to worry about.
“In terms of them banning the tush push, I hate the name, so I hope they do ban it,” he said. “But I can’t control it. We can’t control it, so we don’t even worry about that right now. ... Worrying about whether they’re going to ban the tush push or not isn’t going to win us another championship.”
Eagles coach Nick Sirianni made it clear Tuesday that he still believed the play should remain legal, but he also seem resigned to the idea that it was about to be removed from the game.
“We’ll see where that goes,” Sirianni said. “It’s going to be public (Wednesday). You know how I feel about it. We obviously talked about it at the owners meetings and I don’t think anyone can question what my sentiment is about it, but we’ll see what happens with it.”
Things went Sirianni’s way as they have quite often recently.
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Bob Brookover can be reached at rbrookover@njadvancemedia.com