Dean Blandino: ’50-50′ if Tush Push Survives After Eagles-Chiefs Controversy

Henry McKenna

NFL Reporter

Everyone saw the Philadelphia Eagles jump offsides on the tush push against the Kansas City Chiefs in Week 2. And then … everyone saw it happen again!

Thanks to replay — slowed way down — everyone could plainly see that the officials missed the penalty. And then once slowed down, there was an even bigger question. On the final tush push with 90 seconds left in the game, did Chiefs linebacker Drue Tranquill rip the football away from Jalen Hurts before was Hurts down (or was his progress halted)?

There was essentially no way of knowing. By that point, FOX Sports rules analyst Dean Blandino let his long-held frustrations loose.

“I am done with the tush push guys. It’s a hard play to officiate,” Blandino said on the FOX broadcast.

So, after 22 of the 32 teams voted to ban the play this past offseason, falling just two votes shy of ratification, what are the odds of the tush push surviving next year’s owners meetings?

“It’s 50-50,” Blandino told me. “How does the rest of the season play out? … If something does happen in a playoff game, it’s a short memory, right? This is Week 2. If nothing else happens the rest of the year, is this going to be top of mind?”

Blandino has discussed this play at length, and he will tell you flat out: “I don’t love the play.” His concerns, which are not new, are three-fold: 1) player safety, 2) competitive fairness and 3) officiating consistency. And to be clear, these are not his concerns alone. Owners, coaches and general managers have these same concerns around the league. Of course, none of them resides in Philly.

But it was that third concern — officiating consistency — that came into sharp focus on Sunday. The first question is whether the officiating struggles might spell the end of the tush push as we know it. Because now, teams around the league can use these instances to further support their point that the play doesn’t belong in today’s NFL.

In Philly’s defense, it’s rare to see the Eagles jump offsides on this play. That’s a big reason why it stood out so much against the Chiefs.

“We had three or four plays in the game where it’s like, ‘Man, we’re just not getting this right.’ And so the Eagles will clean that up. I think the officials will emphasize it,” Blandindo said. “And hopefully that corrects that part of it. But the other issues — the difficulty in seeing the football — the other issues that surround this play, those are always going to be there.”

The questions of forward progress (When does Hurts actually lose momentum?) and spotting the ball (Where is Hurts in the pile when he’s stopped?) and even ball possession (Who has the ball?) will continue to be murky. And heck, the rule’s survival might also depend on much bigger factors, like how successful the Eagles are this season.

Jalen Hurts converts a tush-push play for a first down against the Chiefs on Sunday. Or does he? Sometimes, it’s hard to tell. (Photo by Scott Winters/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

“I think there were a handful of clubs that felt like the Eagles won the Super Bowl, and they couldn’t stop the play, and they didn’t want to seem like they were taking the easy route to get rid of it [during the recent vote at the owners meeting],” Blandino said.

Now, if you’re wearing Eagles’ green, you might argue that all those questions about officiating are true on every QB sneak. And you might also argue that every rule — when put up against super-slow-motion replay — looks difficult to officiate.

“Can you see that in the naked eye, right? Well, there’s things they do on defense that sometimes you can’t see to the naked eye all the time,” Eagles coach Nick Sirianni said after the game. “You could do that with a lot of plays on football and slow it down. The referees have a hard job. They have to make split-second decisions that are happening at this speed. You see that sometimes with pass interference, too.”

So if we go back to Blandino’s grounds for tush-push concern, we can revisit competitive fairness. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson once said in an interview that the play is impossible to stop. So … there’s that. Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo told me the same thing before Super Bowl LIX.

There’s also the matter of player safety and concussions — and long-term brain health. There’s no hard data to support the idea that this play is more or less dangerous than any other football play. “That doesn’t mean you want to be reactive, right?” Blandino said. “You certainly want to be proactive and eliminate or mitigate unnecessary risk.” Medical experts — including those in the league office — remain concerned about the play. Blandino added: “I know the NFL health and safety people don’t like this play.”

There’s something to be said for the ingenuity of the tush push — the way its invention pushes … the limits of the rule book not unlike how the invention of the forward pass came into play. But even there, Blandino doesn’t think the play has much merit. It’s a loophole that opened in 2006, one he thinks the league could and should close. The play’s detractors argue it moves the sport back to its rugby-ish roots — a regression. Football is going in a different direction.

And to that point, the play’s survival might come down to the product the NFL wants to sell. Like everyone else, Blandino watched the highlights of the Cowboys’ 40-37 shootout win over the Giants, in which both quarterbacks passed for more than 350 yards. That felt — to him — like the kind of product the NFL wants to present.

The tush push? Not so much.

“Nothing against the Eagles. Nothing against how hard it is to run that play — the way to do it,” Blandino said. “I just think aesthetically, is that what we’re presenting? The athleticism and the grace and everything … and all the things that we’ve come to know and fall in love with for this game.” 

“I just don’t think this play represents that.”

Before joining FOX Sports as an NFL reporter and columnist, Henry McKenna spent seven years covering the Patriots for USA TODAY Sports Media Group and Boston Globe Media. Follow him on Twitter at @henrycmckenna. 

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