As NFL obsesses with possible risks of tush push, it has embraced an increase in kickoff returns

The NFL is about to kill the tush push. Regardless of whether it will keep the Eagles from running the most consistently effective quarterback sneak the NFL has ever seen.

Everyone knows it’s happening because someone decided he doesn’t like it. Whether it was the catalyst or the straw that broke the camel’s back, the sequence from the NFC Championship seemingly sparked the effort to get rid of it.

In the days after the Commanders repeatedly jumped offside at the goal line, prompting a warning from referee Shawn Hochuli that one more violation would result in a touchdown being awarded to Philadelphia, Fox rules analyst and former NFL V.P. of officiating Mike Pereira predicted it — the “ugliness” of that moment would renew the effort to short-circuit the play.

No one will admit that it’s going away because of the optics of the play. When pressed for reasoning, the league shifts the goal posts from safety to “it’s not football” to “pace of play” to whatever else can be fashioned with a semi-straight face.

As one league source has explained it, there’s a clear irony to the situation. In the absence of data to suggest that the tush push creates an actual safety risk, the league has focused on the possibility that a serious injury could possibly happen. And once the genie of possible liability has exited the bottle, the lawyers will plug the opening.

Meanwhile, the league has embraced a change to the kickoff play that will encourage even more returns. Even if the new formation, which eliminates high-speed collisions by cramming most of the players together (except for the kicker, who can and does get blown up, sir), is safer than the old formation, there will be at least 100 more iterations of the kickoff play in 2025.

With not a peep about the potential impact on player safety.

The pushing of the quarterback doesn’t add much to the play. It’s a quarterback sneak. And the quarterback sneak will continue, whenever the Eagles get close to a first down or a touchdown.

Hopefully, the Eagles will run a quarterback sneak on their first play of the regular-season opener. Every team that votes against the tush-push ban — and every team that wanted to oppose it but got its arm twisted into going along — should do the same.

And when the Eagles face the Packers on a Monday night in November, here’s hoping the Eagles will run the quarterback sneak repeatedly on the opening drive of the game.

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