The NFL owners voted against banning the tush push on Wednesday, and as Philadelphia celebrated and mocked accordingly, Roger Goodell and the Packers started looking for their scapegoat.
Green Bay was the team that initially submitted language to ban the tush push, and after failing to garner enough support in April, they tabled the vote until the owner’s meeting in May. In between the two votes, there was a lot of lobbying by people on both sides of the argument, but it was revealed that NFL Commissioner was in favor of the play being banned, and there were suggestions he was leaning on owners to feel the same way.
Now that Goodell and the Packers took L’s on their position, both sides are trying to rid themselves of responsibility for this whole ordeal.
First, Goodell spoke after the meeting concluded and said reports about his interest in the ban was incorrect.
Goodell says that contrary to reports, he wasn’t for or opposed to re-seeding or the tush-push. He was just focused on holding a healthy discussion of both topics.
— Mike Jones (@ByMikeJones) May 21, 2025
Goodell could have made that publicly known anytime over the past five weeks, but chose after the vote failed to remove his support from the effort.
There’s also a new report via a league source to NBC Sports that the NFL recruited Green Bay to submit the initial proposal to ban the play, and that the team doesn’t really have a strong opposition to it.
Mike Florio reported, “The truth is it’s not on the Packers. The league office wanted to get rid of the play. For whatever reason, the league decided not to propose the measure through the normal procedure but to create the impression that one specific team decided to push for no tush push.”
It appears Roger Goodell is just trying to save face, especially if the league did in fact recruit the Packers, but Green Bay isn’t absolved of all this — they could have simply declined to go forward with the plan, if they had a spine.