Lions’ Brad Holmes delivers commencement speech at North Carolina A&T
Detroit Lions general manager Brad Holmes delivered the commencement speech at his alma mater, North Carolina A&T, on Saturday, May 10, 2025.
The tush push will continue this season, and the Detroit Lions are a reason why.
At an NFL meeting on Wednesday, May 21 in Minneapolis, teams voted against banning the tush push, a play popularized by the Philadelphia Eagles over the past four seasons. The Eagles mastered the play on the way to winning Super Bowl over the Kansas City Chiefs in February, their second in franchise history.
But the play has also garnered criticism from some around the league, and the Green Bay Packers proposed to ban it for the upcoming season.
The proposed rule change would have needed 24 teams on board, but only 22 teams voted for the change. While we don’t yet know how every team voted, we do know that the Lions were one of the teams that opposed the proposition:
Teams that sided with the Eagles included the Ravens, Patriots, Jets and Lions.
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) May 21, 2025
The tush push wasn’t the only proposed rule change the NFL was considering.
Detroit proposed a change to the league’s playoff procedure which would have seeded teams based on overall record instead of automatically granting home games to division winners. The proposal reportedly didn’t have much support, however, and the Lions pulled it from consideration before a vote was taken.
The Lions won the NFC North with a 15-2 record in 2025, but would have been relegated to a wild card position had they lost their final regular season game against the Minnesota Vikings. Instead, the Vikings became the first 14-win team in NFL history to play their first playoff game on the road.
You can reach Christian at cromo@freepress.com