Big event last Thursday in New Orleans, with Artificial Intelligence making a big mark on the NFL. How we see football changed before our eyes.
Big event Sunday night in Philadelphia. The sport of football sort of quaked.
More about the AI story in a bit—you’ve got to take time and read what’s happening to the game.
First, the game of the weekend: 5-1 and explosive Miami at the defending NFC champs, 5-1 Philadelphia. Fourth quarter. Eagles ball, up 24-17. Fourth-and-one at the Philadelphia 26-yard line.
Of course the Eagles punt. Right? Only Brandon Staley goes for it here, up seven, minus territory, 10 minutes left. Philadelphia’s defense had stopped Miami three drives in a row. Punt the ball, Nick Sirianni.
Sirianni took the offense off the field. A low murmur, light booing, peppered the stadium as the punt team prepared to do its job. Booing the most logical call, punting from your 26 with a seven-point lead in the fourth quarter. Of course you punt! “This one’s above my pay grade,” center Jason Kelce said, pondering what Sirianni should do. “I don’t know what to do.” Timeout, Eagles.
“So I’m like, well, I’m confident in our defense. And I’m very confident in the play,” said Kelce.
The play? It’s the “Tush Push,” the “Brotherly Shove.” That changed the equation for Sirianni. When you’re 90-percent successful running this weirdo scrum play, with two tons of padded football player pushing and brawling and leveraging for every inch, you think things you’d never have thought you’d do when you took this job head-coaching a Super Bowl contender.
“Nick comes up to us on the sidelines,” Kelce told me an hour after the game, “and he’s like, ‘What am I thinking?! Get back out there. Let’s do this!’”
Jalen Hurts under center. Kelce and four linemates get low. The Dolphins line up three defensive linemen totaling 1,000 pounds, crammed very low within inches of the football. Snap. Hurts gets pushed by two mates from behind, and every Eagle churns legs till the whistle blows. Gain of two. First down. Crisis averted. WIP would have fricasseed Sirianni if the play didn’t work and the Dolphins capitalized on a short field and tied the game. But history is written by the winners. Which, in this case, the Eagles were—31-17 over Miami. And how cool: The two defending conference champs, Philadelphia and Kansas City, are tied for the game’s best record at 6-1.
It’s a crazy play. But if you’re good at it, and TruMedia has the Eagles converting 55 of 61 on the sneaks since the start of the 2022 season, you flow with it. No matter how painful the thing is.
“Nobody wants to defend that play, quite frankly,” Kelce said, “and for us, it’s not a play that you’re super fired up to run because of how exhausting it is. You’re fired up that—you’re confident in it, but you’re definitely like, ‘Man, this is gonna – ‘ “
Pause. He was going to say, “Man, this is gonna hurt.” But Jason Kelce’s a football player, a physical one who plays in the Physical Football Capital of the World. And so his voice switched, just then.
“All right! Let’s do it! Here we go!”
*****
A couple of overriding things about the Sunday night game:
- Miami’s a good team—we all know that. But there is this reality for the 5-2 Dolphins: They’re 5-0 against teams with a combined 8-25 record, and 0-2 against the 10-4 Bills and Eagles. Buffalo and Philadelphia, combined, have beaten Miami by 42 points. Is Miami a nice Wild Card playoff loser, making progress with miles to go before they sleep? It’s time for the real Dolphins to stand up. They play Kansas City in Germany in 13 days.
- The Eagles needed this game after an ugly loss to the Jets. Jalen Hurts still seems creaky, like he’s protecting a leg injury. But he got major help from his defense, which held the Dolphins to 12 first downs and a puny 244 yards. You never felt like Philadelphia wasn’t going to find a way to win this game, even after a tipped pick-six allowed the Dolphins to tie the game at 17.
It’s interesting that Philadelphia’s most consistent offensive weapon right now is the quarterback sneak. Can anyone argue with that? I can’t—not after going four-for-four on it Sunday night. Now 55 of 61 in less than two seasons, it’s easy to understand why Sirianni changed his mind on going for it with 10 minutes left and a seven-point lead in his own territory.
I’ve wondered for a while about the effect of the sneak on the players. Jason Kelce riffed about it, getting to how it actually feels to be in the middle of the mayhem.
“You’ve got to get very low and have great leverage to have a chance for it to work,” he said. “Miami was doing a really good job of fighting the leverage, but I mean, that’s only one component. For us, if you keep your feet moving and you keep pushing, that’s how to succeed. Plus, every time you run it, it gets harder and harder to defend, because it takes so much energy and effort for the defense to muster up to stop it.
“It’s a grueling play. It’s hard to describe because it’s not a high-impact play. You know you’re so close to guys. When you think of big hits, and hits that like, you know, really rattle guys, you think about receivers over the middle, guys just getting blindsided. Typically, when you’re right up against somebody, you don’t have time to build up momentum. There’s a hit but then it’s a continuous like effort to push and grind and it takes a lot out of you. It’s a very draining play. At times, people are lying on top of you. It takes forever to get them off of you and get up. It’s not what I’d call fun. It’s a very grinding play. You feel that for sure.
“The good thing for us is, we know how to run the play and we have a way to get to it at the line. A lot of that play just comes down to who can get organized faster. When you’re able to hit it really with like not a huddle of any sort, and the defense has to get ready to play it right away, the chance that they’re gonna be able to organize as quickly as you are, is even lower. When you know you’re gonna do it, it’s better just to get on the line and do it rather than get in the huddle and come to the line and then they get a chance to talk about how they’ll defend it.”
The key to defending it—if the Eagles win by leverage of continually churning legs—seems to be leverage on the other side plus continual churning of legs on defense. But if you don’t practice against it, it’s tough to play it for the third or fifth time and stop it—when the team you’re playing has done it more than 60 times in-game, with a high rate of success.
Read more in Peter King’s full Football Morning in America column.
