NFL 2025: Rule Change Proposals
The world champions have had their best play contested by a multifaceted rival. Even though the Green Bay Packers were able to successfully throw back the Tush Push numerous times during their two meetings with the Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles in 2024, it is they who have finally decided to move for a vote which could consider the illegalization of the play that has delighted and dismayed the NFL and its viewers, often the latter, often to hysteria. But is there significant-enough precedent, logic, and machinery of rulemaking available to the rule-writing parties to meaningfully mend the relevant sections of the rulebook in order to outlaw the Eagles’ cheese play? That, and other rule change proposal thoughts, below. This is March.
Pack Push Back on the Tush Push
Let’s face it. The Green Bay Packers finally said what we were all thinking. We’re sick and tired of the Tush Push. We’re sick and tired of being sick and tired. We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.
Importantly, the Packers said more or less the above in an official channel, as a high-contracting party to a proposed rule change, and within the proper timeframe and forum, i.e. the buildup to the annual League Meetings, which take place over the final weekend in March (formally running through Sunday March 30 through Tuesday April 2, a date range which gives the billionaire owners and millionaire coaches substantial acreage to get legless at Florida’s famous The Breakers on Friday and Saturday before getting down to business). At a high level, the rule change would ban the current iteration of the ”Tush Push,” the modified quarterback sneak play that the Eagles have been running to nigh-inexorable perfection over the previous three seasons to the unending frustration of 31 other NFL teams. The play, which is otherwise nothing more than a QB sneak that every other NFL team periodically runs (regardless of whether their “actual” starting quarterback takes the snap or subs in a tight end or backup), involves the brawnily-built Jalen Hurts receiving a snap from under center in an Ace (double tight end) set, usually with WR1 A.J. Brown acting as one of these TEs and an additional TE on one side of the line to create an unbalanced LOS, while also flanked at 4 and 7 o’clock by starting TE Dallas Goedert and starting RB Saquon Barkley. The exact personnel, including the OL, has undergone alterations over the past few seasons, but the look has remained essentially the same.
Up to this point, the play is kosher. If Hurts merely barreled forward atop his broadbacked interior offensive linemen for 1-3 yards under his own power and using only his own momentum, this play would be perfectly permissible and unimpeachably aboveboard. However, as we all know, this rudimentary illustration is missing one crucial component. In the Eagles’ version of the sneak, immediately upon receipt of the snap from center, Jalen Hurts is forced forward by his two hefty henchman in the backfield, who push him forward with a two-hand thrust in a crude simulacra of a rugby scrum (though, it must be noted, in a properly-executed rugby scrum, no one actually gets “pushed” forward by another teammate’s hands, but instead by their shoulders – but that’s a different matter). It’s this part of the play that the Packers have decided is worthy of interdiction in the rulebook.
Specifically, Green Bay’s proposal would outlaw the immediate pushing of Hurt’s tush by his backfield flankers, essentially hamstringing the ability of the Eagles to add whatever supplemental propulsion is gained from Goedert and Barkley’s muscle in the backfield. Broadly, this would reduce the Tush Push as we know it to just another quarterback sneak play.
Now, it may be asked whether the Eagles could loophole around this wording by instructing Goedert and Barkley to not immediately start pushing Hurts’ tush, but instead waiting a heartbeat or two after he receives the snap to fall in. This specific issue was raised by Mike Florio on ProFootballTalk, who noted that in theory the term immediately would be an impossible term to define conclusively and would thus be open to a referee’s interpretation. It’s a good and lawyerly point to raise, but in practice, I find it almost certain that were this motion to be adopted, the officiating crew for every forthcoming Eagles game would take a stance on the Tush Push play similar to that of Potter Stewart on obscenity – “I know it when I see it.” Otherwise we would quickly descend into a treatise on quantum physics and the fundamental nature of “immediacy” in the context of time and space. South Philly diehards don’t want that, I think. In any event, the rule proposal seeks to make the Tush Push play as employed by the Eagles impracticable.
There is much to discuss and consider here. For the moment, let’s set aside the play – the Eagles version, the Tush Push – entirely. Let us consider singly the QB Sneak, the genus under which the species t. push falls. To be short about it, unless you are very bad at performing the QB Sneak (which very few long-term NFL starting quarterbacks, for whom there is ample data to examine, are), you will convert almost all of your QB Sneak attempts in short yardage situations, which is really the only time a team will run these things minus obscure situations when they’re stuck up against their own goalline and cannot afford anything less than positive yardage (it should be noted that these scant situations are not included in the following numbers). In fact, in 2024, in situations where the team on offense faced between 1- and 2-yards and ran behind the center or either of the guards (in the phraseology of statistical filters, this is fairly close to exact for QB sneaks, but may also include some direct snaps/draw plays), quarterbacks were a combined 274-of-355 (good for 77% success rate) when rushing for a first down. Jalen Hurts was *only* 83% successful in these situations, which is shockingly only good for seventh place out of nine QBs with at least 10 such rushing attempts last season. Incredibly, in first place, with 93% success and but one single failure on picking up a first down when running up the middle in short yardage scenarios, registering what can only be called a QB rushing equivalent of a Perfect Passer Rating, is Daniel Jones.
Worth noting, of course, is that there weren’t that many quarterbacks who had a lot of these attempts (only nine in the double digits), and Jalen Hurts attempted a rush in these situations 48 times. This doesn’t even include the odd 2-point conversion attempt that the Bama/Okie product attempted throughout the season, which seemed unwise to include since the defense’s approach to defending their territory fundamentally changes on this play (if you’re interested, we looked into it, and Hurts was only 1-of-3 on Tush Push success in these situations; the Eagles spammed this play in these rare post-touchdown scenarios, with 75% of their 2-point conversion attempts coming in the form of a Tush Push!). 48 tries might seem on first observation to be a huge number, considering, but it’s actually only three more than Josh Allen, who had 45 such attempts, and when we factor in that Hurts played one more game (the Super Bowl) than Allen, we see that Hurts ran two TPs in The Big Game, essentially equalizing the frequency with which these two passers performed the push. And we can be *fairly* sure that these are mostly QB Sneak plays, as after checking various different nuanced combinations of filters, we know that one of Allen’s better plays from last season, a memorable scramble after a mesh concept opened up a running lane against a certain opponent, is not included in this list – but we’ll come back to the Bills in a bit. If we look at QBs who had, at minimum, roughly one of these attempts (short yardage, running the ball into the interior of the OL) every two games, a number I’m calling 8 for ease of mathematics, we’re left with the signal-caller coven of the following names: Allen, Hurts, Brock Purdy, Bo Nix, Daniel Jones, Sam Darnold, Jameis Winston, Will Levis, Justin Herbert, Aidan O’Connell (interesting), Russell Wilson, Mac Jones (more interesting), Jayden Daniels, Mason Rudolph, Joe Burrow (surprisingly low on this list), Trevor Lawrence, Anthony Richardson and Geno Smith. Aside from seeing that multiple quarterbacks attempting 8+ interior short-yardage runs for the same team appears to be a hallmark of awfulness (looking at you, Titans and Jags), we can divine some additional contextual reference from these. This group was, collectively, 208-for-258 on successfully converting these attempts into first downs or touchdowns in these situations - 81%. That’s what the average is for quarterbacks who run in these situations at a frequency I’m going to call “with general regularity.” Anthony Richardson and Geno Smith, each of whom only authored 8 attempts on the season, are tied for last at 50%. Jayden Daniels and Trevor Lawrence are a bit better at 67% and 75%, respectively, though neither cracked double digit attempts. Josh Allen, simply by virtue of forcing the issue with importunate gusto, clocks in at only 14th, with 76%. Then, we go through Mac Jones, Bo Nix and Russell Wilson, all between 78% and 80% success, before reaching Jalen Hurts. He converted on 83% of these attempts – again, excluding 2-pt conversions – from Week 1 to Super Bowl, good for 83%. Above him, in ascending order, are Sam Darnold (86%), Brock Purdy (87%), Joe Burrow and Mason Rudolph (both 88%), Aidan O’Connell (89%), Justin Herbert and...Will Levis (both 90%), Jameis Winston (91%) and atop the glorious hierarchy, Daniel Jones (93%, an almost faultless register of resplendence in close-quarters rushing).
That’s it. That’s the list. Jalen Hurts, over about 50 attempts, clocks in at 10/18 among qualifying QBs in SneakStats. If we limit the list exclusively to quarterbacks who participated in these plays a double-digit number of times, he finishes sixth. Finishing in sixth place isn’t great – just ask Detroit, losers in the Divisional round of the playoffs, which in a manner of speaking is tied for sixth place, who themselves succeeded 83% of the time on a macro scale in the 2024-25 season, winning 15 games and losing but three. But that’s neither here nor there, and to the Lions, too, we shall return. Let us set aside the conversion percentages. We must note that, frankly, the effectiveness of the play is not what the Packers, the broader league, or even we as the viewers care about. Even compared to peers, Hurts’ effectiveness is not at all what is at issue. He is very much on par with players like recent, comparatively immobile contemporaries Tom Brady, Drew Brees, and Matt Ryan when it comes to successfully converting short-yardage interior rushes into first downs or touchdowns. This isn’t really what we care about – it’s the frequency that the Eagles run this play with that gives rise to repulsion in the viewer, the opponent, the league at large and the entirety of the NFL establishment.
These stats may not match up 1:1 with those I’ve provided above (though the n-count is the same), but according to Philly Sports Network’s Mike Greger (who should know) quoting CBS Sports’ Jeff Kerr, the Eagles as a team were 39-of-48 converting the Tush Push into a first down or touchdown this season (one off from the number that Personal Vowels reports above). But, of the nine failures, says Kerr, the Eagles followed up with a Tush Push that netted a first down or touchdown on the very next play, meaning that “Essentially they were 47-of-48 (97.9%)” on the season. Which is a level of successfulness approaching lunacy – and, worse, monotony. This fact overflowed the cauldron in an infamous moment during the NFC Championship, where in a span of five “plays” (two “official” plays and three whistled-dead presnap penalizations) the Eagles lined up to run their Tush Push at the goalline with unsparing uniformity, forcing the Commanders, who knew they would not be able to stop the play using traditional means, attempted to guess the snap count and get a jump on the play before Hurts and Co. could set up the sneak properly. After two encroachments, head referee Shaun Hochuli chastised that further LOS violations could lead to an unsportsmanlike conduct violation, which would effect a first down and move the ball half the remaining distance toward the goalline. No matter for Frankie Luvu, the offending party who tried to jump over the center Troy Polamalu-style, though – Frankie was well-versed in the philosophical realities of this situation, remembering that Zeno’s paradox of the dichotomy teaches that repeatedly moving something halfway toward something else will eventually result in a reductio ad absurdum in which movement effectively stops after a certain number of subdivisions. Basically, the Commanders could afford to continue to incur unsportsmanlike conduct penalties for all eternity since moving something continuously halfway toward something will never actually cause the first object to reach the second; anyone who has forgotten to pause their game of Madden before going to make themselves a mayonnaise coffee only to come back and find themselves in 4th-and-65 after 27 delay of game penalties can tell you that for all its comprehensiveness and well-devised accommodations for all manner of scenarios, the NFL rulebook does not have a perfect way of dealing with penalty recursion. Shaun Hochuli, himself well-equipped with knowledge philosophic, saw the Commanders commit a third offsides penalty and, to forestall such an infinitude of encroachment, went one better: he cautioned Washington that he could invoke a never-before-implemented ruling provided for in the NFL rulebook for just such outrageous situations as this, saying that if this nonsense continued he could award a touchdown to the Eagles. Incredibly, Mike Pereira, the FOX rules analyst and self-evidently ingenious master of the rule manual, noted on the broadcast that this awarding of a score – which again, has never happened before – could be used in this extraordinary situation, just moments before Hochuli said the exact same thing. Such a provision gives the suitably ludicrous name “Palpably Unfair Act” to instances like this where the unintuitively lenient rules against committing successive penalties allow for artful subversives to impede the pace of play and turn the game of football into an onerous glitch. To satiate my curiosity, I took a look at the relevant sections describing the Palpably Unfair Act in the official rulebook, and as you might expect the text does not instantiate anything meeting the criteria, instead merely noting “A player or substitute shall not interfere with play by any act which is palpably unfair.” Potter Stewart redux. We ought to be thankful that the NFL has not gone to the trouble and toil of enumerating just what such an act would be, but it stands to reason that referees can act according to their own discretion and probably with impunity if utter madness hijacks a game in an unprecedented, officiation-resistant way. It’s a credit to Philadelphian dominance that they propelled the Commanders to the precipice of the abyss with this play, and this lone goalline sequence may perhaps stand on its own as an argument for why the Tush Push should go away; flimsy grounds if you ask me, but there’s no doubt the NFL does not want to see more examples of multi-penalty stoppages aimed at obstructing the Eagles’ signature mode of short-yardage ground gain. Whether the Eagles or the Commanders should be held to account for letting it come to this is left to the opinion of the individual.
My opinion is this. No one would care about this play if the Eagles converted 100% of their Tush Push plays, if they ran it just a little bit less. It’s a simple thought experiment we can use to test this and I invite the reader to participate now. Take Tom Brady’s QB sneak. He didn’t run it more than once or twice a game – barring one memorably muddled 2019 game against his old nemesis the New York Giants in which he scored two QB Sneak touchdowns (this during the same season that Jalen Hurts, then a quarterback at Oklahoma, was battling Joe Burrow for the 2019 Heisman Trophy) – but you knew when he lined up under center in 3rd or 4th-and-1 that he was going to Sneak it, and he was going to get it. You conceded such to him. But he didn’t *spam* this play, to borrow parlance from the Madden community – he used it sparingly. As did Brees, Ryan, Peyton Manning, and any other QB you can reasonably think of. Even Cam Newton, the closest thing to Jalen Hurts in the decade preceding Hurts’ being drafted (that is to say, a power-running QB instead of a speed-demon rushing QB, though both Jalen and Cam can certainly emulate the latter when needs must) only ran up the interior in short yardage situations 150 times throughout his 11-year NFL career – or roughly 3 seasons worth of Jalen Hurts’ productivity in the Tush Push, which falls into the same stat categorization. For those interested, Cam was 101-of-150 (67%) in picking up first downs, with 18 touchdowns scored, in these situations.
So we’ve shown three things now, hopefully: one, that the Tush Push is effective, though not unstoppable; two, that the Tush Push is run at a much higher frequency by the Eagles (and, this season, by the Bills) than other QB Sneak plays historically have been; and three, that the combination of effectiveness and frequency, as demonstrated by this article’s statistically investigatory unearthings as well as those of Jeff Kerr, lead to perceptibly predictable, monotonously mushy, and difficult-to-defend football, which can drive both players and the viewing public crazy.
This allows us to move to a larger issue that has plagued the pablum surrounding the notion of banning the Tush Push for multiple offseasons. Little of the argumentation in favor of banishing the play to the ballbag of pigskin history focus on the legality, or the precedence, of formally forbidding the play in question because of the rulebook. People just don’t like it because it’s ugly and hard to stop.
I don’t really disagree. It is an ugly play. And it is very hard to stop. But these facts alone cannot possibly be enough to ban a play. You know what else is boring and hard to stop at high frequencies? A Saquon Barkley jaunt right up the middle of the field. Or a Lamar Jackson scramble to the outside that breaks contain. Or a Marcus Allen jump over the top of a pile at the goalline. In a vacuum, all of these things are what I’m going to term “Trademark Plays” of individual players, which are remarkably redoubtable and hard to hinder the successful execution of. But you’d no sooner ban jumping over the pile at the 1-yard line or a quarterback scrambling toward the sideline once a passing pattern breaks down than you would abolish the forward pass (sorry, 2014 Harvard College Gameday hero). The argument that the play too much resembles rugby does not hold together under sharp scrutiny, either – rugby, like gridiron football (to use the proper taxonomy in the scholarly designation) is one of the Codes Of Football, a family of sports encompassing American football, Canadian football (which has a far more interesting connection to American football than you might realize), what Americans call soccer, all types of rugby (not going to get into that morass here), Australian rules football (that hockey-paced game played on an oval-shaped pitch that you see when you’re flipping through channels on occasion), early modern and medieval games like Calcio Storico (just look it up) and a lot of others that don’t need naming right now. Unquestionably, aside from its first cousins like Canadian and Flag Football, rugby is the closest code to football with its emphasis on scoring “tries,” tackling, carrying the ball and field position. Rugby’s first official rulebook predates the “official” first game of college football (which you would not recognize as football, had you a time machine you could use to travel back to Rutgers in 1869) by 25 years, and predates the pivotal game between McGill and Harvard, which bore a vague but marked resemblance to the present game, by 30. Let us be clear – rugby is football, and making use of rugby tactics to win an American football game is fine. It’s not like we’re getting rid of whistles ending plays or changing touchdowns to 5 points and PATs to 2 points. To say that a play looks too much like rugby is like saying a son looks too much like his father.
Viewers of the NFL – as well as 31 other NFL teams – don’t want to bask in the temporal connectivity of 2025 pro football to 19th century English sport, though. Americans are possessive about American football, as they are about Americana generally. The average NFL fan wants something that’s distinct and exciting. And beyond this, there must be recognition that though it is a competitive, un-predetermined sport governed by rules, chance and athletes, NFL football is still directed with immense influential impetus by the need to preserve essential elements of an entertainment product. That means variety, that means novelty, that means unpredictability, that means zest. And the Tush Push, for all its formidably pitiless bulldozing and earthmoving of opponent front sevens, is about as zesty as the “grilled” sandwich option from Chick-Fil-A. It is boring, if beefy. And those aiming for the play’s ouster have an additional missile they can fire from their silo of illegalization: the play is really only legal itself because of a distant rule change hailing from the 2006 offseason which lifted the prohibition on pushing ballcarriers forward. To return to the concept of precedence and how it may factor into any sweeping decision taken by the competition committee, it could be plainly argued that the Tush Push came into being because of a minor rule change and could thus be legally deconstructed and made verboten by a minor rule change all the same.
It would do well to note that until 2022, not a single other team took much notice of this rule change or attempted to fashion a strategy that exploited its expanded freedoms for runners and catchers in any substantive way. The Eagles were the first to do so, and it should be taken notice of that Jalen Hurts was well-known for being the strongest QB this side of CLARENCE BEEFTANK since at least 2016. It is not at all implausible that the effectiveness of Hurts himself as an interior rusher has been masked, concealed, perhaps even belied by the optics of the play for which he has become known when he could do all of this himself with a little help from his IOL friends. Another important piece of this puzzle to point out is that the pushers of the tush have come and gone as roster reconstruction has reshaped the Eagles’ skill position departments, which should go a little ways towards informing us that it probably doesn’t take a first-ballot Hall of Famer to make the most problematic aspect of this play work to perfection.
We could go on and on about this play, as, indeed, the purveyors of pigskin punditry who never tire of supplying purposeless verbiage in service of contrarian contentiousness and ubiquitous argument will continue to do, regardless of the outcome of the rule change vote. I would summarize what I think is the most judicious stance as follows: The Tush Push is a boring, predictably efficient, and reductive play that drags us back into the paleolithic age of ball movement – but, to argue that it should be illegal rests on tenuous evidence, largely disregards the nature of the game itself, and probably would not change the rate of first down and touchdown conversions all that much. It’s their Baltimore Chop, their Sandman Cutter, their Skyhook. Yeah, it’s mundane. Yeah, it’s clichéd. But as George Lucas says: they’re clichés because they work. Regardless of what happens rule-change-wise – be glad you got to see dominance. Even if “The Snoopy,” as the Eagles’ official play phraseology dubs it, doesn’t thrill you like a 66 Circle Option, X-Clown, or 62 Sail-Y Union does. In short, don’t get mad at Lucy for pulling the football away every, single, time – be upset with Charlie Brown for not synthesizing an antidote to his embarrassment after all this time. Hate the game, baby.
(The play is still more like a “maul” in rugby than a “scrum,” though.)
Lions Want Less Punitive Pass-Defending Penalties
We’ll move through the remaining rule changes at a much faster clip. Detroit introduced a proposal which would modify the present state of non-PI defensive pass-defense penalties – i.e. illegal contact and defensive holding – such that these penalties would not result in an automatic first down.
This seems unlikely to pass. Notwithstanding the “tradition tax” we have to levy against any rule introduced, which dictates that new rule ideas will probably meet with staunch opposition to their passage because of how owners and coaches want to maintain things as-is so they don’t have to do anything differently, the NFL wants as much offense and scoring as possible. They will allow these objectives to be met through the calling of defensive penalties. Personally I think it makes a lot of sense for a defensive holding penalty which occurs 5 yards downfield on a 3rd-and-15 to result not in a first down but in a 3rd-and-10 that gets the “re-play the down” treatment instead of an automatic moving-of-chains, but I can also see how reducing defensive holding and illegal contact to yardage-only discipline could make for a spree of libertine, bruising pass coverage in front of the sticks. While this one probably won’t get written in, it's a nice idea that would make for a more level state of play between O and D.
Eagles Entreat Overtime Overhaul for Equality of Opportunity
An interesting overture was made by the defending world champions which was of a different nature than the previous two “between-the-whistles” ideas. The Eagles have proposed a change to regular-season overtime rules that would both extend the length of the regular season overtime period from 10- to 15-minute periods and remove the vestigial “sudden death” haze that mars the current regular season overtime period, in which a team – like, say, the Chiefs – can win the OT coin toss, receive the ball, score a touchdown and leave the field as victors without having to field their defense.
This makes so much sense, and is so unquestionably fairer than the present set of rules governing regular season overtime periods, that it irritates one to think about how this new state of circumstances has not already superseded the existing regular season overtime rules. And I applaud the Eagles for their proactivity in introducing this concept. It took a massive bounty scandal, a quasi-career-ending gaffe from Brett Favre, and an appallingly soft PI call all in one NFC Championship game (the 2009 edition) to change the old overtime rules so that a field goal on the first possession could not win you the game, and it then took multiple MVPs’ seasons and a legend-making Josh Allen performance being ruined by the toss of a coin to convince the competition committee that sudden death on possession one, even by touchdown, was bitterly inequitable in the postseason. Thankfully sudden death on the first possession no longer exists in the postseason, and even though the rules are still far from perfect (as, depending on who you ask, the team who gets the ball second may be in a better position than those receiving first now), there’s hardly an argument for persisting in the old ways which do not give equal opportunity on offense to each team. It’s beyond the scope of this piece, but heightened injury rates as a potential roadblock to this proposal passing should not simply be dismissed out of hand; it does, on a common sense level, make sense that between the postseason and regular season, the postseason should be prioritized if only one of them can have the “good” overtime rules, but we really don’t need to live like this. Fairest, I believe, would be to simply play an entire extra quarter with no triggers based on who scores and when, but as this would almost certainly open up players to higher risk of injury, the best we can hope to do is at least guarantee offensive possession for both teams.
Seeds of Discontent
I put this last as I am almost positive it has no chance of passage, but regardless I want to speak on it briefly. The Lions, bizarrely, have brought in a rule change proposal which would change where Wild Card teams with better records than division winners would be seeded in the playoffs, such that a team that won 14 games but didn’t win its own division would be seeded higher than a 10-win division champion. The obvious recent example, from which the above numbers are borrowed, is the plight of the 2024-25 Minnesota Vikings, who despite winning 14 games had to play on the road against the NFC West-winning Los Angeles Rams (themselves playing on the road, too, given the wildfire situation that was unfolding near Los Angeles at the time). The Vikings were soundly, categorically, and more or less humiliatingly defeated by the Rams, so this offseason might not be the best one during which to propose this change. It's also odd – bizarre, as I said above – that the team that would introduce this potential modification to playoff structure would be the Detroit Lions, whose week 18 defeat of the Vikings granted them the NFC North crown and forced the Vikings into Wild Card pauperdom in the first place.
I get why this rule has support. I get why it would both benefit winning teams and justly demote teams with higher losses who nonetheless won weak divisions. I even understand why this rule makes marginally more sense in 2025 than it would have in, say, 2015, when there were multiple teams who received byes; logically since only one team receives a bye and homefield advantage in the 14-team playoff structure, the one seed could not be affected by this rule change, but a very well-performing divisional opponent of the one seed could be rewarded, as would have been the case with the Vikings had this rule been in place last year. Notably, the Vikings would not have been the 2 seed last year, as they finished tied with Philadelphia at 14-3 and lost out on tiebreakers, though it was close. There would have been other changes in the NFC playoffs as well, since Washington and Green Bay, along with Minnesota, finished with better records than the NFC South and NFC West division winners. It would have meant a relegation of Los Angeles and Tampa Bay to the 6th and 7th seeds despite their division championships, meaning they would have to play on the road against the Wild Card teams. We would have even had the rare scenario, though not one that’s totally unheard of, of two Wild Card teams playing each other in the Wild Card round (Green Bay would have travelled to Washington instead of Philadelphia under these rules). This happened before most notably in the 1999-2000 NFL playoffs when the Tennessee Titans beat the Buffalo Bills by scoring both a safety and a kick return lateral touchdown. The Eagles would actually have been the only team in the Wild Card round on their side of the bracket not affected by this. While I like the idea of rewarding teams for winning, I don’t like how this rule would make division races less important...now, if we’re talking about the College Football Playoffs, however…
We have divisions for a reason. It’s fun to see mighty Wild Card teams go into the confines of supposedly inferior opponents and either wallop them, win close, or get stunningly upset by upstart squads who barely emerged from the confused mayhem of a bad division. We don’t want to see the chaos of Wild Card weekend, characterized so potently by the periodically nonsensical yet familiar imbalance between good non-division-champions and mediocre division winners, attenuated by unilateral divisionless seeding, do we? I don’t. I’ll close with this: as with the Tush Push, sometimes things that may seem out of place in the game of ball are what make it so glorious.