Sports

NEW YORK — Formally, the NFL league meeting agenda this week did not include conversation surrounding the tush push, multiple sources told Yahoo Sports. 

Informally? The debate surrounding one of football’s most controversial plays continues as the 2025 NFL season approaches the halfway mark, with a growing expectation that a vote to ban the tush push will again reach the tables of NFL team owners come spring.

Cowboys team owner Jerry Jones said he expects a vote to be held in the spring.

“Only my opinion, but I think yes, it will be,” Jones told Yahoo Sports. “And it has to do with, while the merits of it have really been the merits of the play and the concerns have been addressed, you still see that it’s one that probably has enough criticism that it will come up again.

“I think it probably will come up for a vote.”

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The initial vote surrounding a ban of the tush push play, and more likely a broader ban of any pushing or pulling of the ballcarrier, was tabled last March before narrowly failing in May. Passing the vote required two-thirds approval, or 24 votes; the league fell short as 22 of 32 teams voted yes.

That majority approval signaled the opportunity to revisit a vote a year later. And now, after a mixed-message campaign failed in 2025, the league seems to be coalescing around a clearer message: the play’s challenge to fair officiating.

While NFL executive vice president Troy Vincent said there “hasn’t been much discussion internally” about a rule change, he did elucidate the continuing complications the tush push creates.

“What has been said by officials the last two years when we've discussed the push play [is it’s] very difficult to officiate in real time,” Vincent said Tuesday from league meetings. “‘Hey, when the guard jumped, when the guard moved, it's really hard.’ Or the guard was in the neutral zone or someone else was in the neutral zone, it is really hard for that line judge to identify that based on where he is at, looking down the line of scrimmage.

“At the end of the day, there's a team [in the Philadelphia Eagles] that still does it well and we've seen other people have versions of it. But from an officiating standpoint, we want to try to get better at identifying when someone's in a neutral zone or when someone leaves a little early.”

Controversy has bubbled this season, including in September when Fox color analyst Tom Brady pointed to false starts by Eagles guards on a tush-push attempt against the Kansas City Chiefs. The missed call, in a rematch of the most recent Super Bowl, drew heavy scrutiny.

Some league sources believed that the next ban proposal could come primarily, if not exclusively, on the basis of officiating confusion, a framework more likely to galvanize teams than the health and safety or “it’s not a football” play arguments pushed last year. The health and safety arguments struggled to compel teams given that the limited sample size of the play led the league to use projections, rather than past evidence of, the risk of serious injury.

“To me, they should have just said, ‘We can’t officiate it,’” one high-ranking NFC executive told Yahoo Sports. “They set themselves up for failure. They deserve what they got.”

The Green Bay Packers, and since-retired president Mark Murphy, introduced the proposal last year. The proposal would likely need a new sponsor this year in Murphy’s absence, with some believing the NFL’s competition committee could be interested given the officiating concerns. 

Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones, who serves on the competition committee, said it was too soon to determine whether the committee would do that. Data later this season will influence any decisions. 

“It’s not going to be touched during the season,” Jones said. “This spring, I think we’ll go over it again … and we just got to see if we’ve got the votes.

“Obviously, there were a lot of people who were ready to move on last year.”

Kathryn Riley via Getty Images

In the meantime, the league says it will strive to improve officiating more broadly, continuing to integrate technology including replay assist and a sky judge to supplement the on-field human officials whose ability to see all clear angles is limited.

The NFL could use artificial intelligence as a tool in officiating, commissioner Roger Goodell said Wednesday.

“We’ve added replay assists as [we] use technology, which I think is really a valuable thing,” Goodell said. “We're looking at how AI can be a factor in that. How can we use AI to maybe help in officiating as well many other areas throughout this league? So I'm quite optimistic that we'll continue to have more technology and that will involve more communication either between the crews, between our office and the replay [team].”

Part of the decision surrounding the continued integration of technology into officiating will be teams’ tolerance levels for game stoppage and penalties. Vincent said about 10 “live ball” fouls, or fouls after the snap, have been called per game, in seven weeks. Pre-snap fouls have further augmented that. Some believe officials are calling fouls too “ticky-tacky,” he said; others have voiced concerns officials are missing too many violations.

The league office asked clubs to consider their top goals in officiating as the group considers how best to strike the balance.

“What’s the tolerance level for each foul?” Vincent asked. “Because there’s a foul on every play. And if you don’t call it, it’s going to show up in what we call ‘misery Mondays.’

“We spent a pretty good amount of time on just: What does the future look like from a penalty standpoint?”