When word leaked that a “secret” team had proposed to eliminate the “Tush Push” play from the game, it was a brief mystery to everyone but Green Bay Packers fans.

We knew. Or at least those Packers fans who pay attention knew.

Once a month over at Packers.com, team president Mark Murphy publishes his column titled, “Murphy Takes Five.” In his February installment, he directly criticized the Tush Push and said in no uncertain words that it should be banned.

He went so far as to say, “There is no skill involved,” and added that, “The series of plays with the Commanders jumping offsides in the NFC Championship Game to try to stop the play was ridiculous.”

If you’re familiar with the what the play, er, entails, you can skip this paragraph. For the rest of you, it’s a version of the traditional quarterback sneak that has been popularized by the Philadelphia Eagles in recent seasons. The play involves the offensive line getting leverage against the defensive line, and three players pushing quarterback Jalen Hurts from behind at the snap of the ball. The Eagles have plenty of muscle up front and, as a result, it’s damn hard to stop.

As recently as 2005, pushing a ball carrier forward was still an illegal move, although it wasn’t heavily enforced in its later years. The league decided it was too difficult to officiate.

The scuttlebutt for me brings to mind Bart Starr’s winning quarterback sneak in the Ice Bowl in 1967. One famous photo shows Starr diving into the end zone with two Dallas Cowboys draped over him, and running back Chuck Mercein doing his best to go over the pile with his hands thrust in the air.

Of course, as we know today, he was not signaling "touchdown" but rather was making sure it didn’t look like he was pushing Starr into the end zone. Mercein thought he was going to get the ball on the play and so was powering toward the hole that his quarterback squirmed into.

“When you're on ice, you're not going to stop on a dime,” Mercein told Packers’ historian Cliff Christl, referencing the icy turf that day. “So that was when I threw my hands up in the air to kind of indicate to the officials, if they thought I was trying to push him in, that I didn't have anything to do with it."

Otherwise, the play might have a different name. (The Mercein Lean? Probably not.)

As time went by, however, enforcement grew less and less frequent, until it was officially removed from the game as an illegal move.

So, are we in, or are we out on players pushing ball carriers forward?

The NFL rule book, in Rule 12, Article 4, titled “Assisting The Runner And Interlocking Interference,” still prohibits a player from pulling a ball-carrying teammate forward.

So, what’s the difference? It seems to me, a push is as good (or bad) as a pull in a given situation. If this logic holds, Murphy certainly has a point. Why one and not the other? In addition, many who oppose the play’s continued use have pointed out that the Tush Push looks a lot more like rugby than American football, and they may have a point as well. It doesn't fully pass the eye test as being an NFL football play.

But I tend to be in agreement with former Packers executive Andrew Brandt, who said on social media, “There was a time when Aaron Rodgers had an uncanny ability to (1) draw teams offside with cadence, and (2) quick snap to draw 12 man penalties. Then, teams prepared for it better and adjusted. Feel like the same should happen with Tush Push instead of it being legislated out.”

I mean, it’s football. Don’t let the Eagles offense get into goal-line or fourth-and-1 situations and then it can’t execute a Tush Push against you. Teams have managed to stop it at time. The Packers stopped a Tush Push in their first game of the 2024 season by getting low and gaining leverage at the point of attack.

CBS Sports’ Jeff Kerr reported that the play’s success rate has diminished over the three seasons since it was first used: The success rate was over 90% in 2022, fell slightly to just over 88% in 2023, and fell again to 82.4% in 2024. (Although, apparently that doesn’t factor in situations in which the Eagles used the play twice in a row to gain a first down.)

And it may take a while, but once teams begin stopping it with some measure of regularity, that opens the door for variations and trick plays. That’s how the NFL works – when something works on offense, defenses figure out how to stop it. That, in turn, forces offenses to figure out something different, which forces defenses around the league to again adjust. It’s a cycle. Hell, there was a time in the NFL when the punter was your team’s key weapon, and that wasn't legislated out of the game, it was the game that evolved in a new direction with no small amount of help from the forward pass.

Still. I don’t think there’s any chance the rest of the league follows Murphy’s lead and votes out the Tush Push play at the owners’ meetings. It's simply too popular with casual fans. It will be discussed and possibly even hotly debated, but I think we’re stuck with the play – at least until someone finally figures out how to stop it with some regularity. I don’t think anyone’s going to convince Murphy of this, though.

“The play is bad for the game, and we should go back to prohibiting the push of the runner,” Murphy wrote. “This would bring back the traditional QB sneak. That worked pretty well for Bart Starr and the Packers in the Ice Bowl.”

Maybe the league can just ban the name “Tush Push.” I suspect we could all agree on that one.