To understand the Tush Push, start with the league’s most valuable backside. Jalen Hurts’s lower half isn’t like most lower halves. His legs extend from his midsection like sequoias that are the envy of their forest, fortified by a lifetime in sports and his high school hobby of powerlifting.
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Hurts squats more than 600 pounds and could, according to those who train him, surpass 750 if he focused solely on strength. His coaches find his lower half more impressive than his arm, which can chuck footballs country miles. If that lower half isn’t the strongest among NFL quarterbacks, it’s in the top three.
There’s no scarier sight for defenses in 2023. The Eagles face a third- or fourth-and-short. They pack in together at the line, as Hurts scans the defense. The ball snaps. He moves, inching ahead, behind one of the NFL’s best offensive lines. When his movement stops, help arrives, in the form of one or two teammates lined up behind him whose sole goal is to target his buttocks and, well, push, as hard as possible.
Last year the Eagles dialed up their bodies-on-top-of-bodies invention 41 times during the regular season and made either a first down or touchdown on 37 of those attempts. They also deployed six in Super Bowl LVII and had six conversions, two of which were TDs, that gave Philly a chance to win. The Tush Push is so ruthlessly effective that it has earned multiple nicknames: It has also been called the Brotherly Shove, the Rump Bump and the Two-Cheek Sneak. (You could also go with the Seat Cheat or Can-Do; for our money, the moniker should be Baby Got Back–ed, in honor of Sir Mix-a-Lot.)
But there’s more to the play than a quarterback’s incredibly strong seat and some clever branding. It looks like a simple display of brute force, combining the bluntness of a traditional QB sneak with the irresistible force of a 30-car pileup. But the most dominant play in today’s NFL was made possible by a cycle of rule changes, coaching innovations and cross-sport pollination that stretches back nearly two decades.
“We took a QB sneak, already a high-success-rate play, and we made it damn near unbeatable,” says one Eagles staffer. “It’s simplistic. But it’s innovative—because there’s a lot of technique to it.”
