EAGAN, Minn. — At some point, someone had to say it.
“Can we just vote already?” San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York asked a room full of NFL owners and team executives on Wednesday morning, after 45 minutes of debate at the NFL’s spring meeting served as the next chapter of the discussion that will (seemingly) never end.
Eventually, the owners voted, and the tush push got its stay of execution, with 22 of 32 owners voting for the Green Bay Packers’ proposed ban on the Philadelphia Eagles’ signature play, two short of the number needed for it to pass. This, of course, was after an original proposal was shot down in March, then rewritten, with the league office’s backing, to try again to get the adapted Jalen Hurts quarterback sneak removed from the NFL.
Wednesday provided a perfect encapsulation of how out of hand this whole thing has gotten in the three months since the Eagles won their second Super Bowl title.
Philly arrived in Minnesota loaded for bear to defend its position on the rule. Owner Jeffrey Lurie stood in front of the room for the majority of the aforementioned 45 minutes, touching just about every base on why the Eagles felt like their discovery of this play—through a mix of scheme and the strength of their own personnel—shouldn’t be governed out of the game. After that, Philly legend Jason Kelce took the floor and, supported by video, took the room through the mechanics of the play and why he felt it wasn’t overly dangerous.
Then, with the room already worn down by the Eagles’ defense strategy, assistant GM Jon Ferrari, a former league-office employee, explained the execution of the play and how it was officiated, which was when Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula, and York spoke up. Jones asked a slew of devil’s advocate questions of Ferrari. York then tried to move everyone to vote, joking that he’d have to get himself a bourbon if one didn’t come soon.
That was when commissioner Roger Goodell made the decision to end the general session, and move the vote to the privileged session, which is owners only. There, the final count of 22–10 was taken, and meeting concluded.
There were plenty of concerns raised that led to the Cleveland Browns, Miami Dolphins, Eagles, Jacksonville Jaguars, New York Jets, Detroit Lions, New England Patriots, Baltimore Ravens, New Orleans Saints and Tennessee Titans voting against the ban. One issue was that down-the-field hustle plays, where teammates give ballcarriers a shove to gain extra yardage, would be a casualty. “You don’t want to legislate effort,” one source says. Another associated with that opinion was the Packers’ rewriting of the rule was too broad, and would be tough to officiate.
The league office, meanwhile, clearly wanted to find a way to get a ban through at the spring meeting, which is why Goodell kept it alive after it failed to get the votes needed at the March meeting. Even after the ban was defeated a second time, some believed that the current writing of the rule could allow for the NFL simply to officiate certain things more aggressively.
Article 4(c) of the player-assist rule, as it stands now, reads that “an offensive player is prohibited from pushing or throwing their body against a teammate to aid them in attempting to obstruct an opponent or recover a loose ball,” according to the NFL’s rulebook. Some thought, over the past couple of days, that the league could interpret that in a way to curb the tush push. Others disagreed completely.
Either way, after the “spicy” session, no one seemed completely satisfied with the result.
More so, in line with York’s thinking, they appeared happy to be done with the discussion.
A few other notes as we leave Minnesota …
• The Lions’ open-seeding proposal was withdrawn before Wednesday’s session, but there was a robust discussion in the room afterward.
Los Angeles Rams president Kevin Demoff delivered the most poignant remark, asking the room, “What are we trying to accomplish here? Fairness? Or better competition at the end of the season?” The NFL’s motivation, in sticking with the Lions’ proposal, has clearly been the latter, after a number of teams have rolled over in Week 18 and even Week Week 17 the past couple of years. An open-seeding format would combat that, adding higher stakes to more games.
What Demoff is alluding to is that the playing field isn’t always level for teams competing in different divisions. So one team’s 11–6 record could actually be a greater accomplishment than someone else’s 13–4 mark. The NFC East, for example, plays the NFC North and AFC West this year, while the NFC West gets the two South divisions.
So, as Demoff said to the room Tuesday, much of this boils down to what you prioritize.
“For me, No. 1 is we gotta make sure that we respect the winners of the divisions,” Steelers owner Art Rooney II told me. “So I would not be in favor of anything that changes that. If we start talking about, O..K.., after the first round, maybe we reseed, I’d be open to that conversation. There are a lot of factors in terms of schedule. Maybe it only applies to a team that’s below .500. That can be talked about.”
“My No. 1 deal is just to continue to make the game positive for our viewers. You want all 17 games to be meaningful, and that’s hard to do toward the end,” Cowboys COO Stephen Jones told me. “The more you can have that mean a lot, I think that’s important, and that’s what gets my attention on continuing to look at this and see if there’s a better way to make more games important in the last week of the season.”
So everyone left the meeting resolved to keep looking it. “Obviously, it’ll be top of the agenda for us next year, to continue to consider ways to look at it,” Jones said.
The league has challenged everyone to have an open mind, with some thinking the NFL might, for the first time in decades, look harder at its scheduling formula. Others doubted that the league would ever mess with the formula it uses for scheduling, but just asking questions about it is a good illustration of how this conversation very clearly will continue into 2026 and beyond, and particularly if the NFL does, eventually, go to 18 games.
• I don’t get the sense that the New York Giants are particularly happy about their return engagement with Hard Knocks so soon after their 2024 experience. It certainly wasn’t by choice that they’re along for the ride, with the NFC East set to be featured on Hard Knocks: In-Season in the fall.
• I love the Protector of the Year award, and credit to Bills OT Dion Dawkins and my buddy Andrew Whitworth for helping to hatch the idea. Offensive line is the one position group that almost seems ineligible for the big awards—no offensive lineman has ever won AP MVP, Offensive Player of the Year or Offensive Rookie of the Year honors. So having this sort of prize for the big men is long overdue.
• That Minnesota Vikings WR Justin Jefferson came over to The Omni Viking Lakes Hotel adjacent to the team’s practice facility to help celebrate NFL players being allowed to participate in the 2028 Olympics was cool. But that he was noncommittal on actually playing is also a precursor for what’s to come. These are going to be complex decision for players, with different circumstances in play in almost every case.
• I don’t mind the NFL moving the onside kickoff team up a yard to give them a better chance to succeed. I also don’t want the league making it too much easier for a team to recover one. This is just me, but I think it should be hard to steal a possession, and I wouldn’t want a team building a two-possession lead over a 60-minute game to be cheapened.
• Goodell was pretty testy about a barrage of questions on the absence of the Accelerator program on the agenda—it’s actually still on the league’s calendar online. But the optics aren’t great. Goodell just had a photo op with Donald Trump, which I believe is the first such event an NFL commissioner has done with a president in 22 years, and Trump’s administration has had strong feelings on D.E.I. efforts that emerged from COVID-19. So the timing is, at best, a tough coincidence for the league.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as NFL Spring Meetings: Eagles Wear Down Owners Defending Tush Push.