Eagles’ Trick Play Under Fire: NFL Team Wants Super-Charged QB Sneak Banned
One unnamed NFL team has proposed banning the Eagles’ famed Tush Push or Brotherly Shove, according to the league’s vice president of football operations Troy Vincent.
On the surface the idea seems a little silly because multiple teams have tried a variation of the play to far less success than the Super Bowl champion Eagles, who have the NFL’s best offensive line and a quarterback who happens to squat 600 pounds in Jalen Hurts.
NFL Media’s Judy Batista noted that a persistent safety dogma that can often fuel quick changes by the league will not be a winning argument for banning this particular play.
“Question on the Tush Push play is whether it could be modified to keep some semblance of the play intact,” Batista wrote on the X platfirm. “The play is run so infrequently that there isn’t enough injury data for the league to push for a ban based on injuries alone.”
This is not the first time there has been talk of banning the Eagles’ super-charged version of the quarterback sneak. Some decry the aesthetics of the play which admittedly are not exactly visually pleasing and others are simply jealous of Philadelphia’s success with it.
If the rule change is officially proposed this time, it could be voted on at the NFL’s annual league meetings in Palm Beach, Florida, next month. Any rule change proposal would need 24 of 32 owners to sign off on it and it’s hard to imagine a consensus developing.
After the 2022 season, there was some talk but not much substance behind the idea to ban the play.
The irony is that the Eagles were a very strong QB sneak team before adding the pushing to the equation because of their strong O-Line and then-QB Carson Wentz, who had a knack for it.
The same would be true this time around because few would be able to stop Hurts in short yardage during a conventional sneak formation.
The idea that this is some kind of “signature play” for the Eagles also doesn’t pass muster. As Batista noted, the play is ultimately run so infrequently that there is not enough injury data to build a statistically significant model comparing it to other “dangerous” plays like kickoffs.
