“It’s only one yard,” — Eagles wide receiver A.J. Brown Tuesday when asked about the NFL movement to ban the tush push.
The “Longest Yard” used to be best known as a movie. Well, actually two. The one starring Burt Reynolds in 1974 and the remake starring Adam Sandler in 2005.
Now, those two movies have company.
This decade’s “longest yard” is the one the Eagles keep picking up in rather simplistic fashion. NFL teams can’t stop it on the field and their first organized bid to stop it off the field also failed Wednesday in Eagan, Minnesota.
It is truly amazing that a game that has 120 yards of space if you take into account the two end zones has become consumed with one team’s ability to consistently gain a yard.
Lincoln spoke for two minutes at Gettysburg in the middle of the Civil War.
Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie spent nearly an hour at Eagan pleading with his fellow owners not to get rid of the tush push.
Fourteen weeks and one Super Bowl ago, our troops pushed Jalen Hurts into the end zone in the middle of the first quarter and a rout was on. Do not in these dark times deny our inalienable right to push and shove and huff and puff our quarterback forward across the line to gain.
The owner even brought reinforcements, forcing his peers to also listen to former Eagles star center Jason Kelce explain why he wouldn’t have retired if he could have just run the tush push on every play.
There was lots of hyperbole going on with both sides. The Eagles’ players downplayed the issue Tuesday when given a chance to defend a play that has worked so well for them.
Brown’s “it’s only a yard” quote is really off base because that single yard has come to represent something the Eagles themselves could have never envisioned when they first ran the tush push on opening day against the Detroit Lions in an effort to run out the clock.
It is now a statement of brute force that has been caught many times on video.
You can see that in this clip at the 5:30 mark when the Eagles shove Hurts forward for a first down against the Miami Dolphins and Dallas Goedert taunts the defense by saying, “You guys don’t know it’s coming? It’s coming every time.”
In the same video, two unidentified Cowboys players discuss their own inability to stop the tush push.
“I’m running that play until the Fat Lady sings,” one of them says.
“Until they make it illegal,” the other says.
The Eagles have used the tush push to loosen the Fat Lady’s vocal chords by running out the clock. They’ve used it to get first downs. They’ve used it to get touchdowns. When it hasn’t worked on third down, they’ve gone right back to it on fourth down.
For three years now it has driven other team’s mad and some of that anger boiled over in Minnesota before the vote was taken on the Green Bay Packers’ revised proposal to ban the tush push.
According to ESPN, 49ers owner Jed York at one point asked Lurie “how much more s---,” he needed to say.
The league built its case against the tush push by claiming it was a dangerous play without any significant medical data. That was something Lurie called out during his pre-vote plea, accusing commissioner Roger Goodell and vice president of football operations Troy Vincent of supporting the ban based on data that doesn’t exist.
Could someone get hurt on the tush push next season? Yes. Is there less of a chance someone could get hurt on a conventional quarterback sneak? If the answer is yes then the league needs to prove it.
In the end, the Eagles left Minnesota, site of their first Super Bowl title, with another victory.
A total of 24 votes were needed from the owners to ban the play. The vote was 22-10, the same score by which the Eagles beat the Packers in the first round of last year’s playoffs.
Lots of back tracking took place after the vote with many claiming the Packers were used by the NFL to present the case against the tush push because they don’t have a visible owner the way others teams do. Goodell also said he wasn’t for or against the ban of the tush push following the vote. I’m not buying that swamp land.
We should point out that Eagles coach Nick Sirianni’s former assistants Jonathan Gannon (now the Arizona coach) and Shane Steichen (now the Indianapolis head coach) couldn’t convince their team officials to side with the Eagles. Sirianni had said at the owners meetings earlier this year that he expected their votes because the play helped them get head-coaching jobs.
New Orleans (now coached by last season’s offensive coordinator Kellen Moore) did side with the Eagles as did the Jets, Ravens, Lions, Browns, Jaguars, Dolphins, Patriots and Titans.
And so the tush push lives another day, which means the movement to get rid of it will also live another season.
The Eagles’ players who were asked about the play Tuesday either downplayed the issue or, in Hurts’ case, refused to talk about it at all. But you know that Hurts and the Eagles love that they still have the play at their disposal.
What was once an idea to run out the clock in Detroit has morphed into the ideal short-yardage play.
It’s only one yard, but we now know that one yard can change the entire complexion of a game and throw an entire league into an uproar.
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Bob Brookover can be reached atrbrookover@njadvancemedia.com