Don’t be gaslighted by football memories that only go back 20 years.
Yes, the Tush Push is most likely on its way out, in its current form. Yes, the Green Bay Packers are the team that submitted the rules proposal to do away with it. And yes, twice during the 2024 season the Packers played the Philadelphia Eagles — the team that most famously and successfully uses the play — and the Packers lost both games.
But no, the rules proposal is not doing away with some long-standing NFL rule or erasing a fundamental facet of the sport of football.
Somehow, a narrative has arisen among some NFL fans and analysts that this play — pushing a quarterback from behind on a QB sneak — is symbolic and indicative of “old-school football” and that banning pushing ball-carriers from behind is tantamount to eliminating a core facet of the game that dates back to its early days. However, this argument could not be farther from the truth.
In fact, this rule change closes a loophole that was created just 20 years ago, returning football to how it was played prior to 2005. The rule penalizing “assisting a runner” has existed since the early days of the sport of football. Research on exactly when the rule was instituted is challenging, but it may date back as far as 1906. The Intercollegiate Athletic Association (which would later become the NCAA) instituted a massive set of rules changes for football that year, partially at the behest of then-president Theodore Roosevelt, in response to a slew of deaths during violent college football games.
Among the rules implemented that year were legalizing the forward pass, requiring a neutral zone betweenv the offensive and defensive lines, and requiring 10 yards for a first down. All of those rules were implemented to make the game safer and more spread out, avoiding the massive scrums and impacts that led to those fatalities. Although this writer could not find clear confirmation that the assisting the runner penalty was included that year, it is logical that it would be included as a safety-related change.
At the very least, we know that pushing a runner from behind was illegal during Vince Lombardi’s tenure as head coach of the Packers, and that it had been illegal for some time before that. Perhaps the best example of this is shown in a famous photo of Bart Starr’s quarterback sneak during the Ice Bowl in December 1967.
Chuck Mercein, the running back behind Starr on the play, thought he was getting the football on the play when Starr elected to sneak it. Here is a quote from Mercein, who talked to Packers team historian Cliff Christl for an article published in 2017 :
I’m almost in the hole when I realize I’m not going to get the ball, (Starr’s) keeping it. So the next thing I thought, ‘Pull up. Don’t push him into the end zone or assist him, which was a penalty.’ I couldn’t stop. When you’re on ice, you’re not going to stop on a dime. So that was when I threw my hands up in the air to kind of indicate to the officials, if they thought I was trying to push him in, that I didn’t have anything to do with it.
As Mercein’s comments suggest, the penalty for pushing a ball-carrier was so ingrained in football by the 1960s that a running back’s first thought — well, his second, after his surprise at not getting the handoff — was to find a way to make it clear to the referees that he wasn’t pushing his quarterback.
The rule continued on unchanged until 2005, when the NFL rolled back the “no pushing” rule, citing the difficulty of officiating the play. Still, there was little concern about rolling that change back to its original until recently.
Yes, the Eagles have found this loophole and capitalized on it. And is the impetus for the proposal to reinstate the ban on pushing a ball-carrier the Eagles’ relative advantage with this play? Possibly. Probably, even. If fans or pundits want to call the Packers or the rest of the NFL cowardly for doing away with pushing the ball-carrier, then that is their right.
But there are two final points worth acknowledging about the push to change the rule back. First, the NFL has often moved quickly to close loopholes in its rules that individual teams have used to create a competitive advantage. Personally, I think of this facet of the rule change as being similar to when the NFL changed rules around fumbles so that the offense could not advance a fumble on 4th down or in the last two minutes of the game. That rule change came about because of the “Holy Roller ” play in 1978, when Ken Stabler fumbled the football forward while being sacked. The league has often changed its rules quickly when loopholes are discovered, and if anything, it’s a bit surprising that they have not done so sooner with pushing a ball-carrier.
Finally, football fans should simply refuse to listen to those who are trying to push a revisionist history by claiming that this is doing away with something that is a foundational facet of the sport. It’s a dishonest argument when, in fact, pushing a runner was illegal for nearly a century and appears to be one of the rules created that largely define the sport as we know it today.
Continue Reading @ Evan "Tex" Western
Evan "Tex" Western wrote: