On Thursday night against the Cowboys, the Eagles used their signature play twice. It worked both times, even if the first effort initially seemed to come up a little shorter than the spot.

Regardless, the tush push is back — less than four months after it survived by only two votes. Which means that 22 of the league’s 32 teams wanted to get rid of it.

Will the tush push survive 2025? The overriding question, as one source with knowledge of the assault on the play explained it to PFT, is whether and to what extent the tush push has an “unremarkable” year.

It largely did in 2024. It wasn’t until the Commanders decided to jump offside multiple times in the NFC Championship that the noise started regarding a potential ban. Within weeks after the Commanders were warned that another deliberate jump would result in the Eagles being awarded a touchdown, the league office gave the Packers a nudge to propose that it be scrapped. And off the process went.

The tush push could become “remarkable” in 2025 if actual injury data emerges suggesting that the play isn’t safe. In March, NFL chief medical officer Allen Sills explained to owners the potential risk for catastrophic injury. Sills, we’re told, focused on the possibility of a serious neck injury from the head-to-head contact during the surge generated by the offensive line.

In May, the Eagles brought future Hall of Fame center Jason Kelce to the meeting in Minneapolis. He rebutted the notion that the play causes the kind of linear helmet collisions that can compress, and injure, the cervical spine. And Sills wasn’t there to respond to the Eagles’ presentation.

As one source put it, Sills’s absence from the May meeting was noteworthy.

The Kelce presentation worked. As one source from a team that was opposed to the tush push told PFT, the Eagles “had good points that there isn’t medical data to support it’s as dangerous as was earlier indicated or hinted at.”

Still, the vote fell only two votes shy of succeeding. If the league office decides to make another run at removing the play from the rulebook, the only two teams need to be flipped.

As another source put it, “I think they’ll keep it, unless they get rid of all the leverage plays. Pushing pile, etc. . . . Progress stopped and then the OL pushes the ball carrier forward.”

Indeed, the effort expanded in May from focusing on the tush push to rewinding the clock to 2005, when all pushing of the ballcarrier was prohibited. Many regarded that, however, as a thinly-veiled attempt to create the impression that the entire exercise wasn’t targeting a play that the Eagles have mastered. Even if it was.

The biggest factor for 2025 will be whether any legitimate injury data regarding the tush push emerges. All it takes is one of the serious injuries about which Sills warned in March to legitimize the hypothetical concerns he articulated.

Another factor will be whether more teams use it well, and whether any teams can come up with a way to stymie it. (It will be very interesting to see if any of the 22 teams that opposed it start using it.)

The biggest question will be whether the person(s) who instigated the effort to get the Packers to propose a tush push ban decide to make another run. That likely will require the league to get the Packers or another team to propose it again. As another source explained it, the effort to do an end run around the Competition Committee happened because a unanimous vote of the rule-proposing body is needed to take a proposed change to the owners.

The league office did it twice in the offseason. The Lions admitted that the league office encouraged them to propose playoff reseeding, and PFT has reported that the league office got the Packers to mobilize against the tush push. If one team will do the league a solid in March 2026, and if two of the 10 that saved the tush push can be persuaded to go the other way (assuming that the 22 who voted to end it hold firm), this season could be the swan song of the tush push.