Last offseason, the NFL considered banning a play made famous by the Super Bowl champions: the Tush Push. The measure was hotly debated both by team owners and in the press, and banning the play gained support among owners despite loud opposition from fans. Twenty-two owners voted to ban the play, enough for a majority but two votes shy of the threshold needed for adoption. The play stayed.<\/p>\n
One year later, after a season filled with controversial instances of the play, the proposal to ban it was nowhere to be found in the league\u2019s rule change discussions.<\/p>\n
A change in the balance between risk and reward may be behind the shift.<\/p>\n
Last offseason, NFL owners stated that injury risk was their motivation to ban the play. This confused fans, largely because owners could provide no proof of an increased risk.<\/p>\n
I think it is worth exploring why owners may have been concerned about an injury risk despite the data. To do so, we must look at three aspects of the play: the force of the players involved, the value of the players involved, and the chance for the play to be successful.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s start with the force.<\/p>\n
In most running plays in football, the schematic goal of the play is simple: the offense\u2019s heavy players try to move the defense\u2019s heavy players out of the way so that someone fast can run through the gap. The Tush Push inverts this. The goal is for the offense\u2019s heavy players to get behind the person with the ball to push them through the defense\u2019s heavy players. In most plays, force is relatively isolated; it is the strength of one or two players on one side against the strength of one or two on the other. In the Tush Push, it involves the combined strength of ten offensive players against the combined strength of eleven defensive players, all through one ball carrier used as a pawn in the middle who is also trying to generate some force of their own.<\/p>\n
As a result, the amount of force applied to the ball carrier from both directions is abnormal in the sport. And while there was no pattern of injuries on the play, the amount of force involved creates risk that any injury could quickly become severe.<\/p>\n
Unlike most running plays in football, the Tush Push typically features the quarterback, not the running back, as the ball carrier. Quarterbacks are longer and less muscular athletes, making them susceptible to being bent in odd directions. More importantly, they are each team\u2019s most valuable asset, their ticket to relevance.<\/p>\n
If your team is going to run the Tush Push, you have to be willing to put your most valuable and irreplaceable player in the middle of a pile featuring the strongest players on each team pushing as hard as they can. This player is one who is not accustomed to facing this level of physicality in most games, and being pushed in the back or shoulder at the wrong angle could ruin their season, if not career. An injury to a star quarterback is the kind that can alter the direction of a franchise.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re an owner of a team that just guaranteed $100 million to the player that puts your team in primetime games, sells jerseys, and gets you to the playoffs, I think it is easy to see why you would not want to put them in that pile regardless of what any past injury data says. You don\u2019t want to be the one team that gets unlucky.<\/p>\n
Now of course, there\u2019s an easy solution here: if you aren\u2019t comfortable with the risk, don\u2019t use the play! That\u2019s where the success rate comes in.<\/p>\n