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INDIANAPOLIS — NFL competition committee co-chairman Rich McKay said Sunday that he is not anticipating an attempt to ban the tush push this year, one year after debate over the short-yardage play roiled the NFL.
“There’s no team proposal that I’ve seen from it,” McKay said following a day of meetings at the NFL combine. “So, I wouldn’t envision it. But you never know.”
ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported in September that there were no assurances of reviving the tush push debate in 2026, as sources cited the vitriol of last year’s discussions and the eventual failure to garner enough support for a change.
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The play has largely been utilized by two teams: the Philadelphia Eagles and Buffalo Bills. Overall, the NFL saw slightly more tush pushes in 2025 (112) than in 2024 (101). The Eagles (27) and Bills (17) by far led the league in attempts, but other teams began experimenting with using tight ends rather than quarterbacks to take the snap — most notably the Pittsburgh Steelers and Seattle Seahawks. The conversion rate was slightly lower in 2025, as teams made a first down on 76.8% of attempts compared with 82% from 2022 through 2024.
Although there have been some subjective concerns about the safety of the play, the NFL has yet to publicize any health data to support those suspicions.
The 2025 debate was fierce. The Green Bay Packers directly targeted the play in February 2025 by making a proposal with unusually specific language to ban it. The Packers’ proposal called for a prohibition on offensive players immediately pushing a teammate who is lined up directly behind the snapper and receiving the snap.
NFL rules require approval from 24 owners to enact a rule change, and only 16 supported the ban as written at the time. The NFL tabled discussions in its March meeting of owners, but the Packers revised their proposal to more generally prohibit players from pushing all ball carriers, no matter where they were on the field, in essence reviving a rule that existed in the NFL until 2005.
The revision failed by two votes during the league’s May 2025 meeting.
In other news, McKay said:
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He does not envision a “big year” in terms of proposed rule changes. “The game is in a pretty good place,” he said.
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There has been some discussion about changing the process for playoff seeding, but he has not yet seen a proposal yet.
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The committee had a long talk about the NFL’s catch rule. After a number of controversial rulings in 2025, particularly as it applied to the element of time required for a completed catch, McKay said: “Our technology today is extraordinary, so the ability to go frame by frame and slow things down, it’s a great solution for a lot of things but it does present challenges for others. We need to make sure your rules, as written, don’t just match up [with] what’s on the field but how it’s looked at in replay.”
