The Packers' proposal to ban the tush push wasn't voted upon at the league meeting, but Packers President Mark Murphy sounds confident that the tush push will be out of the NFL this season.
Murphy said in a video released by the team that he believes there's enough support for a rule against pushing runners to be adopted next month.
"I think it ended up in a good place," Murphy said. "We ended up tabling it, but we had a really good discussion, talked a little bit about our safety concerns regarding the play, just kind of the style of the play, but good interaction with the league and so it'll be tabled and then what we're going to do is it'll be voted on in the May meeting and so we're going to go — in 2005, the league did away with the rule that you couldn't push runners and so we're going to go back and see the language that we had in 2004 and I'm optimistic. I think there's enough people that kind of look at it and say it's really not good for the game, it's more a rugby play than a football play, just kind of go back to what used to be the rule."
Murphy referenced perhaps the most famous quarterback sneak in NFL history, by Bart Starr in the 1967 Ice Bowl, and how Packers running back Chuck Mercein raised his hands in the air as he fell into the pile behind Starr, not to celebrate the touchdown but to demonstrate to the officials that he wasn't pushing Starr into the end zone, which would have been a penalty in those days.
"In the Ice Bowl, Bart Starr's touchdown, talking to Chuck Mercein, a lot of people thought when he put his hands up that he was signaling touchdown, but he was showing that he wasn't pushing Bart Starr," Murphy said.
If Murphy's preferred rule change passes, the Packers will be raising their hands in celebration that the Eagles will no longer get to use one of the NFL's most effective short-yardage plays.
