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Long live the tush push! The controversial play’s top moments


  • Kalyn KahlerMay 21, 2025, 01:30 PM ET

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      Kalyn Kahler is a senior NFL writer at ESPN. Kalyn reports on a range of NFL topics. She reported about the influence of coaching agents on NFL hiring and found out what current and former Cowboys players really think about the tour groups of fans that roam about The Star every day. Before joining ESPN in July of 2024, Kalyn wrote for The Athletic, Defector, Bleacher Report and Sports Illustrated. She began her career at Sports Illustrated as NFL columnist Peter King’s assistant. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she was a varsity cheerleader. In her free time, Kalyn takes Spanish classes and teaches Irish dance. You can reach out to Kalyn via email.

BILL SNYDER DOESN’T understand what all the fuss is about.

The legendary Kansas State coach, 85 years old and retired from coaching, can’t remember exactly what the Wildcats called the play because it was just an add-on to a sneak. He didn’t — and still doesn’t — think it was very innovative or creative.

“It was just a natural thing to do,” he told ESPN of the play that would become known as the “tush push” and eventually inspire a raging NFL-wide debate. “We need to create a way in which we could take the shortest distance to get the short distance we needed to go and not get held up, because everybody put all the people over there, so we wanted to compete against no matter how many people you put there. We wanted to be strong enough not to get held up at the line of scrimmage. And we would bring one or two, or on occasion, three backs up right off of the hip of the center, and on the snap of the ball, we would push the center or push the back of the quarterback.”

Snyder said he’s not aware of anyone running the play before his Wildcats teams, who added the play soon after 2013, when pushing became legal in college football. His offensive coordinator, Dana Dimel, took the concept with him to UTEP when he became head coach there in 2018 and experimented with running fake sneaks off of it. (Dimel died in 2023.) Snyder said that sometimes opposing coaches would complain to officials during games but that it never went further than that because the play was within the rules. He said he has never heard from any NFL coaches about it. He’s not sure the Eagles even knew he was running the play years before they were, and he certainly doesn’t believe it was special enough to warrant such attention.

“It was like any other play,” Snyder said. “It was just a play in our repertoire, and that’s what we did on certain occasions, and we didn’t treat it any differently than any other play that we had.”

But that’s not how the league office or a majority of NFL owners look at the play. For cited reasons including health and safety and pace of play, a large group of teams who believe pushing has no place in football attempted to ban the tush push. Those efforts came up short, with 10 teams voting down the efforts to ban it Wednesday.

Although what was likely the first tush push took place in Manhattan, Kansas, Eagles coach and former Colts OC Nick Sirianni has credited Eagles offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland, former Colts head coach and Eagles assistant Frank Reich, and quarterbacks Carson Wentz and Jacoby Brissett for inspiring the play. Though nearly every team in the NFL has run it, the Eagles are the face of the play (or perhaps the tush of it). It was Philadelphia that ran what some believed would be the final such play in its Super Bowl LIX win over the Chiefs — the team’s first touchdown of the game — when Jalen Hurts powered his way into the Caesars Superdome end zone.

When asked in March how he would feel if he ended up being the last coach to call a tush push, Saints coach and former Eagles offensive coordinator Kellen Moore said: “Give credit to Jalen and all those guys for creating a play that someone decided we’re just going to make a rule up to stop it. “

In the end, an impossible-to-stop play remained impossible to stop, even for the league office and a conference room full of owners.

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Saquon Barkley to tush push critics: ‘Get better at stopping it’

Philadelphia Eagles star Saquon Barkley discusses the tush push debate before this year’s Met Gala.

IN THE THREE-ISH-YEAR NFL lifespan of the play, 28 of 32 teams have run a variation of it. The only four clubs that have never pushed the player taking the direct snap on a sneak are ones that have smaller or possibly more fragile quarterbacks — Miami, Carolina and Washington, plus New Orleans, which has a dynamic backup in Taysom Hill with his own short-yardage packages.

Not every push sneak is made equal (some feature a very late and likely incidental push from a running back out of the I-formation), and there is no specific stat available to ESPN to filter for the distinct formation that we recognize as the Eagles tush push, where the offensive line is crouched low to the ground and the running backs, tight ends or receivers cluster on each side of the quarterback or behind him in a tripod shape. So ESPN’s push sneak numbers reflect all kinds of sneaks where the player taking the direct snap under center is pushed by another player at any point.

Since 2022, 12 teams have scored touchdowns using the tush push. Philadelphia has run more tush pushes than any other team (124 for 106 first downs and 33 touchdowns, nearly twice the number of push sneaks as the Bills, the team with the second most) and converted 85.5% of them, but Buffalo has a better first-down success rate than the Eagles, and has converted 88.2% (60 of 68 attempts) for first downs.

Though no other team has come close to running the play as much as the Eagles, Philadelphia’s success with the tush push coincided with a leaguewide increase in quarterback sneaks.

In 2016, the first year ESPN started tracking quarterback sneaks, there were 109 sneaks. By 2020, that number had doubled to 234, and by 2023, the year after the Eagles ramped up their own sneak usage and leaned into the tush push, the leaguewide sneak usage plateaued at triple the 2016 number: 341 sneaks.

Even if passed, the proposal wouldn’t have prevented the quarterback sneak, just the pushing aspect, and, as the Eagles said multiple times during their advocacy for this play at league meetings this offseason, their success rate has actually been higher on sneaks without pushing.

According to ESPN data, which has identified push sneaks since the 2022 season, the Eagles have run only six regular non-push sneaks in the last three seasons, compared with 124 push sneaks.

Their success rate on regular sneaks is 83.3%, 2.3 percentage points lower than their success rate when pushing.

Lament the continued legality of the tush push if you must, or choose to celebrate its best qualities: The tush push is innovative; it’s efficient; and it requires more skill and technique than has always been evident. The tush push is far from dead … long live the tush push?

The first one

Contrary to popular belief, the first Eagles tush push actually happened as early as 2021. Stoutland and his O-line group led by center Jason Kelce had been a fan of the quarterback sneak well before Sirianni arrived as the head coach that January. During previous coach Doug Pederson’s tenure, the Eagles had pushed the boundaries of going for it on fourth down and had used quarterback sneaks with the mobile, 6-foot-5 and 230-plus-pound Wentz to convert many of them.

In 2021, Hurts’ first full season as the Eagles’ starting quarterback, that short-yardage philosophy continued. And in the first quarter of a Week 11 game at home vs. the Saints, tight end Dallas Goedert motioned left across the formation and then came back to the right to settle in just behind Hurts. At the snap, he pushed to help Hurts get the yard needed.

It was the only one of their 18 sneaks that year that featured a planned push. But the next year, the Eagles nearly doubled their sneak total, running 35 sneaks in a year that ended in the Super Bowl, 16 of which were push sneaks. They even ran six sneaks in the Super Bowl loss.

The pushing started in earnest in Week 1 of 2022, with Goedert motioning and pushing. Then Philadelphia tried out different variations of pushers throughout the 2022 season — lining up a running back behind Hurts, and then debuting the now-familiar formation with a player on each of Hurts’ hips (similar to what Snyder’s Kansas State teams did) against Dallas in Week 6.

The one that wasn’t

The Eagles pulled off a fake sneak more than once, and that’s what made the tush push a thing of game-planning beauty. When defenses committed to stopping it (look closely and you can see defensive tackle Jonathan Allen throw himself sideways, almost lying on the ground to stop the offensive line), it left them vulnerable on the outside for a play like this.

The one that made the Bills really mad

Another beautiful thing about this play is that even when it doesn’t work, it still works. All the Eagles had to do here was line up in a formation that resembled the tush push and be in a short-yardage situation, and Bills defensive tackle Jordan Phillips got hot to stop it, left early and plowed through Eagles offensive lineman Cam Jurgens. The officials called an encroachment penalty for 5 yards, and Kelce argued that it should have been a personal foul for 15 yards.

At the combine this February, Niners general manager John Lynch, who is a member of the league’s competition committee, talked about how he was afraid that this play would lead to defensive players acting out. “I think back to my playing days, and I think that might have made me do things that I wouldn’t be proud of because if they aren’t going to stop it, I’ll stop it,” Lynch told reporters. “That kind of trickles into players that have a certain mentality [in their] head. I’m just being truthful there. I hope that’s never the case.”

The one where the Chiefs faked a field goal

Kansas City has never run a tush push with Patrick Mahomes, but it did run one of the coolest variations of the play on special teams, which is surprising because ever since having Mahomes and a successful offense, the Chiefs’ special teams unit has been pretty conservative. The only time Kansas City has ever tried this play was out of a field goal formation while up 3-0 in the second quarter against Denver in 2023.

Just before the snap, holder Tommy Townsend ran up to the line of scrimmage, and at the same time, tight end Noah Gray and offensive lineman Wanya Morris ran in from the wings. Gray took the direct snap, and Morris and Townsend pushed him forward.

This looked awesome, but the Chiefs ran this on fourth-and-2, and Gray gained just 1 yard.

The one where the Jaguars countered

The 2024 Jaguars were not a good team, but they can hang a banner for stopping two Eagles tush pushes on 2-point conversion attempts in Week 9 of last season — and the way they did it was something not many other defenses have tried to do. The argument for the tush push’s place in the NFL is that football is all about innovation as a necessity. Offenses put stress on defenses to find ways to counter their creativity, and that’s how the game grows and stays interesting. The Jaguars found a way to push back on the Eagles — literally — by lining up two linebackers close behind their defensive linemen, particularly the one lined up across from the Eagles center. Stopping the Eagles’ center from getting the low drive is the key to stopping the play, and the Jaguars committed their linebackers to backing up their defensive linemen instead of trying to time the snap and leap over the top to stop Hurts’ momentum, as most other teams did.

At the league meeting in March, multiple head coaches said the tush push shouldn’t be allowed because pushing defensive linemen isn’t allowed on field goal block attempts. What many of those coaches didn’t mention is that pushing defensive players on a regular offensive down is legal and a strategy they could have employed.

“The defense can push as well,” ex-Eagles OC Moore said in March. “As it’s written right now, it’s not like the defense can’t push as well.”

The Jaguars showed on tape what can happen when you counter the Eagles with their own attack. But Falcons coach Raheem Morris said at the March meeting that he wasn’t comfortable doing that with his defensive players.

“I don’t like the play because of what I have to do to try to stop it and for me to have someone push a human into another human, potentially what could happen, I don’t like. … I don’t want to do what I think is necessary to try to stop it.”

The one that was a six-in-a-row ‘s— show’

The Eagles love to run this play back-to-back, because they are rarely stopped for no gain, so if they need a yard on third down and get a half a yard, that sets them up for a positive fourth-down opportunity to run it back.

Philadelphia ran a push sneak three times in a row against Arizona in 2022, illustrating that commitment. Then, this past January, they repeated the play six consecutive times after four Commanders defensive penalties nullified second down, took a minute off the game clock, and ultimately prompted referee Shawn Hochuli to issue an official warning to Washington that if it committed another “palpably unfair act,” he would award the Eagles a touchdown.

“I was aware that that may happen if there’s a continued penalty over and over,” Washington coach Dan Quinn said at the March league meeting. “But we’re not going to concede to anything. That’s not how we get down. So that meant, we’re going to go fight for it to the last second of the last play of the last moment.”

Again, the beauty of this play is that, just by threatening it, the Eagles already won. And for the Commanders, taking the consequences of half the distance to the goal to live another play was better than surrendering a touchdown, which they ultimately did on the sixth tush push attempt, after Hochuli’s warning.

It was a series that made the tush push a real target for elimination because of that “pace of play” logic, that this isn’t a watchable television product. One source familiar with the competition committee’s thinking told ESPN the series was a “s— show” that created real momentum for banning the play.

The one where Josh Allen loved the left guard

When Hurts runs this play, he usually goes straight forward, following his center immediately at the snap, and the Eagles’ offensive line gets such a push — or, as they called it, a “knockback” — that Hurts can just ride the wave forward. But the quarterback who has run the second-most tush pushes does it a little differently, and it would ultimately cost him in this case. Instead of moving directly forward at the snap, Bills quarterback Allen took the snap and often waited a split second before stepping to his left and following the space created by Buffalo’s left guard. According to TruMedia, Allen has stepped to his left on 42 of 68 push sneak attempts.

Kansas City sniffed out this tendency ahead of the AFC title game and prepared for it.

“I mean, from our defensive side, he always QB sneaks to our right,” Chiefs safety Nazeeh Johnson told SiriusXM’s Mad Dog Sports Radio. “So every time we see him in QB sneak formation, we know he’s coming to the right side every time. It’s a hundred percent, 10-for-10, he’s going to that side.”

The Bills converted only two of five sneak attempts in the game, including one that drew an unfavorable and much-debated Buffalo spot on fourth down.

The most recent one… but NOT the last one

The Eagles ran only one tush push in their second Super Bowl appearance ATP (After Tush Push) because they simply didn’t need it any more than that against the Chiefs. The Eagles rarely found themselves in late-down, short-yardage situations, and because they got off to a quick lead, they could settle for field goals on fourth down.

Chiefs defensive tackle Chris Jones laid himself out horizontally in an all-out effort to stop the play at the goal line, similar to the Commanders’ defensive line technique.

Philadelphia’s first touchdown in Super Bowl LIX nearly turned out to be its last tush push. But after Wednesday’s vote, the play lives on. Expect the controversy to endure as well.





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