Bear Digest

Bears' chances to stuff the infamous Eagles tush push are looking up

Stopping the tush push Sunday by the Steelers one time helped, but there is another very good reason to think the Bears could shut down the Eagles' controversial short-yardage play.
Gene Chamberlain|
Eagles QB Jalen Hurts lines up for the tush push at the goal line against the Kansas City Chiefs during Super Bowl LIX.
Eagles QB Jalen Hurts lines up for the tush push at the goal line against the Kansas City Chiefs during Super Bowl LIX. | Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

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Chicago Bears

The tush push play from Sunday's Bears win making the rounds on national TV highlights and social media obviously has been the 55-yard run around right end by Pittsburgh's Kenneth Gainwell.

The one the Bears care about more now is the other one, when they shot down the play on fourth-and-1 to take back the ball and momentum after their own turnover. It was something the whole defense took pride in achieving.

“The intensity, the get-off, pad level and the way we like to try to play it, defend it, high effort play and everybody doing what they needed to do," defensive tackle Grady Jarrett said, describing how they achieved the stop.

Massive Andrew "Big Bill" Billings proved the key by putting his 340-pound frame exactly where he needed to in order to stop it.

“I thought, upfront, it started there," said coach Ben Johnson, no fan of the play. "It is such a hard play to really talk about a whole lot because you're really crouching that neutral zone and seems like there's a lot of movement right there at the snap on both sides.

"And so, I thought  Big Bill, I think it started with him over top of the center and then the rest of our guys did a nice job just stopping that charge and huge play force at that time."

There's no doubt what the stop did in the game in terms of getting the Bears momentum back, and the electricity provided along with possession of the football.

“Just being able to stop one of football's most hated plays, we got a stop on the fourth-and-1," Jarrett said. "It was just hype, just to be a part of that and being in that interior push.

"We stopped them on a kind of trickery play that was going to be a converted first down, but it was a fourth-and-short.

"There was a big turnover for us really to be able to stop that high percentage play for them. It brought us a lot of juice and we were hyped up.”

The reason this is all so big, of course, is Friday's opponent made the tush push famous and continues using it more effectively than any team.

However, the Bears are going against a Philadelphia Eagles offense executing the play at a far lower success rate than in the past.

The Lions stuffed it two weeks ago. According to the website Tushpush.fyi, the Eagles have converted only 16 of 25 times and had three false starts this season. Their conversion rate is only 64%.

According that website, the average for the league is 69.4% and the other  teams who have run it this season converted 34 of 47 times or 72.3%.

So the Eagles aren't even hitting the average for the league this year or for the combined other teams who have run it.

This is in direct contrast to last season and 2023, when former CBS Sports reporter Jeff

Kerry tracked the Eagles' tush pushes at 88.1% in 2023 and 82.4% in 2024.

Jarrett wants to see something similar from the Bears to what they used Sunday in shutting it down.

"Kind of like the one we had yesterday, match force for force and let the results take  care of itself," Jarrett said.

The Packers sought to get the play banned in the offseason, but their campaign came up a little short of votes. Perhaps they'll try again this coming offseason.

In the meantime, the Bears can do something on the field about snuffing out the play said to be disliked by most fans

Why is it loathed so much?

"I mean, you've got social media," Jarrett said.

Stop the Eagles from running it for a first down or touchdown and that social media will be lit up with the Bears defense rather than people complaining about the play's legality or laughing about the tricker the Steelers used to burn the Bears in tush push formation.

Or better yet, maybe Ben Johnson adopts the play he said he doesn't like and turns it into a flea-flicker pass. He's never found a formation he couldn't enhance with trickery.

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Gene Chamberlain
GENE CHAMBERLAIN

Gene Chamberlain has covered the Chicago Bears full time as a beat writer since 1994 and prior to this on a part-time basis for 10 years. He covered the Bears as a beat writer for Suburban Chicago Newspapers, the Daily Southtown, Copley News Service and has been a contributor for the Daily Herald, the Associated Press, Bear Report, CBS Sports.com and The Sporting News. He also has worked a prep sports writer for Tribune Newspapers and Sun-Times newspapers.