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Tony Dungy’s anti-Tush Push Argument has One Major Flaw
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Tony Dungy was disappointed with the Tush Push vote:
“I felt like it was going to stay in place because it helped scoring. It’s an offensive play and we tend to go for that. When I came into the league back in the early 70s, or mid 70s, there were rules against assisting the runner. You could block for the runner – that’s how you helped them – but you couldn’t pull a runner or push a runner, and now, for some reason, we seem to think that’s okay. We have rules that regulate the defense, what they can and can’t do, defensive guys can’t leap on top of people to block a PAT, can’t do certain things, but pushing the runner seems to be okay, and I just think it’s not fair football, and I was disappointed, but I wasn’t surprised…. We can line up 10 people behind the quarterback and push him and you have no chance to stop it on defense.”
Dungy makes a much more compelling argument than the crabby jamokes on social media. Probably because he’s a Super Bowl-winning head coach and not a crabby jamoke on social media. He talks about the inherent advantage that offenses gain from knowing the snap count and being able to assist the runner. He talks about the original ruleset, and how it disallowed the pushing and pulling of ball carriers. He talks about why that creates an unfair benefit for the team with possession.
The only problem with his argument is that if the play is so unfair, then why can’t everybody do it? Why are the Eagles the only team running it with a high level of success? If it’s so easy, wouldn’t the Geico caveman be able to do it?
Until Tush Push detractors find an answer to that question, their opposition will remain flimsy. Because, if you think about it, 32 NFL teams all running the push to perfection will absolutely result in banning of the play. It will be so ubiquitous and lopsided and boring that they will have no choice but to remove it from the game. But it hasn’t reached that point yet. Only one team is leveraging all of these supposed advantages to their benefit. That’s the defending Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com