🏈 To Ban or Not to Ban: Tush Push

Photo via ESPN

What to know: For years now the Philadelphia Eagles’ “tush push” play has gone unstoppable and unable to replicate. Other teams try to stop it, try to put it in their playbook, but fail to execute the play at the level of the Eagles. Now, it seems that a “unnamed NFL franchise” has proposed a vote to potentially ban the play. If you can’t beat it, ban it?

Turns out the Packers proposed the vote, but I’m not going to call them out because I’m sure they aren’t alone. There are two schools of thought here, I suppose. The one being in favor of banning: teams saying it’s dangerous, hard to practice for player safety reasons, and unfair in the game because players are trying not to get hurt. That side I get of it. If player safety is really at top of mind, then I suppose it may be the right move to ban it.

The other school of thought is stop whining because you can’t figure out how to do it like the Eagles or stop it. Which seems to be the more popular one among NFL lifers and former players.

Here’s where I stand: stop hiding behind the "player safety” card. If this proposal was TRULY about player safety, it would’ve been brought up after the Eagles first implemented it. Now, multiple years later, after EVERY team in the NFL unsuccessfully tried to replicate it, all of a sudden it’s a player safety issues.

What a joke. I agree there’s a bit of a player safety issue here, but nobody would be complaining if they knew how to do it so well, too. Player safety is no joke, but if you really cared about it, you wouldn’t have asked your players to do it too.

Do I think it should be banned? Maybe. Show me data that it’s more dangerous that any other play and I’m in. But don’t try to convince me NFL owners care so much about player safety that they need to ban this ONE specific play. Figure out how to do it or stop it.

This is me, stepping off of my soapbox.

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