Cal’s rugby coach has thoughts on how 49ers can stop Eagles’ tush push

The 49ers are tasked with the hardest rotating job in the NFL this Sunday with their upcoming matchup against the Philadelphia Eagles and their famed — infamous to some — “tush push.” Head coach Kyle Shanahan knows it, star edge rusher Nick Bosa knows it, and Cal’s 29-time national champion rugby coach Jack Clark knows it.

“I don’t know that there is a reliable answer to stopping this tactic if they only need a yard or two,” Clark told SFGATE over the phone Thursday.

The “tush push” is an adaptation of the quarterback sneak. In a short-yardage situation, instead of a quarterback snapping the ball and diving in between his lineman, the offensive lineman — in Philadelphia’s case, it’s often the trio of left tackle Jordan Mailata, left guard Landon Dickerson and center Jason Kelce — create a low driving wall that collapses into a wedge that quarterback Jalen Hurts rides like a wave with the assistance of teammates pushing him from behind.

The Eagles debuted this play last year and have become synonymous with the move, even though one of the first instances of the phrase appearing in an NFL broadcast came during a Buffalo Bills game. Through the 2022 season, the Eagles had a success rate of 93.5% when running the play. For reference, the NFL average in 3rd/4th-and-short situations this season as of two weeks ago was 61.3%. As its popularity has exploded, so too have calls for the play to be outright banned, and questions to opposing teams, such as the Niners, about what they plan to do to stop the apparently unstoppable.

To understand the “tush push” — sometimes called “the brotherly shove” in Philadelphia or an “abomination” by one NFL pundit — one has to understand its origins in rugby. The innovation comes from veteran Scottish rugby coach Richie Gray, who advised Eagles offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland on how to improve the progenitor of the now-popularized play. (It could have come to the NFL even sooner, as the league changed language in the rules to allow player to push their offensive teammates forward in 2006.)

Cal’s Clark, a member of the United States Rugby Hall of Fame, saw the rugby influence immediately with how the Eagles created a narrow, layered force to penetrate through an opposition that stacks the line of scrimmage with large defenders trying to shoot gaps in the offensive line.

“If you walked up to a pane glass window, and you slap the window with your hand, it might not break,” Clark said, offering an analogy for how the block is so effective. “But if you walk up there with something very pointy, of course, with the same force, it will indeed break.”

“The accuracy of their push becomes really important,” he added. “There’s a rugby principle in that. We push in the scrum, we push in mauls, we push in rucks. All of those areas are efforts to combine what resources you have to push the other team to go forward. Where we put our shoulders, what we grab and the angles of our push and everything become pretty important.”

It’s that explicit rugby connection that helps Clark — along with his 39 years as Cal’s rugby coach, six years as the head coach for U.S.A. Rugby, and his brief stint as a professional football and rugby player — recognize the herculean task that comes with having to stop this play. Even in the sport he’s spent more than four decades of his life with, and where the play was birthed, there are “moments in our game” where stopping an offense is simply “impossible.”

One of those moments is the 5-meter lineout. When the ball goes out of play, a player from the team opposite of the one that last touched it prepares an overhead throw-in from out of bounds like in soccer. Each team then has a set of players that line up in-bounds 5 meters across from the thrower, with a middle passing lane in between them that the throwing player must throw the ball into. Just like how a jump ball in basketball must go straight up, the rugby ball must go straight down the middle of the lane. Similarly, players can jump, or even be lifted, to catch the ball but must only go straight up.

When this happens within 5 meters of one team’s try line (basically their end zone), that team has the opportunity to grab the lineout, and then essentially carry the receiver in for a score. 

“It’s just near impossible to stop the other team,” Clark said. “Used to be you stay on the ground there and you try to resist the drive. Nowadays, teams are going in the air. Your best chance is to try to win the ball in the air because if they win the ball, they’re digging and driving in. So we have the same problem, it’s very difficult.”

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. The conversion rates the Eagles have put together may seem intimidating, but some of that can be attributed to the harebrained schemes teams have attempted to put forth against the tush push. Daron Payne, defensive lineman for the Washington Commanders, put his hand under the football before the snap. His teammate Jonathan Allen was lying down on all fours and still got bowled over. Other teams have tried lining up in unconventional formations while firing into offensive line gaps at convoluted angles, all to no avail.

Naturally, Clark draws his solution, or at least what he believes could be one, to stopping the tush push from rugby philosophy.

“The answer is probably unfulfilling to some, but you just mirror that activity,” he said. “Whether it’s over the center, or over the guard, you stack into those places and you try to layer your defenses well and you just mimic them. You don’t try to tackle the ball carrier. You just try to go forward and create that space for the guys behind you to go make that tackle.

“You want to make sure you don’t have one guy on their guard, one guy on their center and one guy on the other guard, for example. That’s a recipe for failure. You’d have to layer in your defense, just the same way that they’re layered in theirs, or they would just beat you. They would have a man and a half, or two men, on one man. And that’s really the concept at work here is how narrow and how pointy that thing gets. And it’s just crazy to think about stopping it in 1 meter.”

Part of the recipe is tightening up as closely as possible short of straight up interlocking arms with one another ahead of the snap, which is how a rugby scrum operates. Still, this strategy only gets a team so far: A team needs a defensive line that can keep up with the speed that the Eagles’ offensive line jumps forward and linebackers that can match Hurts’ incredible lower body strength to bring him down.

While the personnel advantage sure appears to be limited to Philadelphia, the NFL’s inherent copycat nature among teams means that others are not too far off from employing the most effective version of this play themselves — other teams are trying with less frequent success. If this play spreads, along with its success, how long until short yardage situations become simply a given for the offense, and the only option for defenses is to just throw up their arms and let the tush push happen to them? Questions like this have fueled the calls for the NFL to step in and ban the play, though Bosa didn’t share this perspective.

“I don’t see why it wouldn’t be legal unless guys were getting hurt a lot,” Bosa told KNBR on Tuesday. “I don’t know how they get so much push, so I’ll definitely be watching tape on it this week when we get into it. I’m impressed with how good they are at it. We got to be good on first and second, because you don’t want to have to deal with that too much throughout the game.”

Clark also thinks the NFL shouldn’t take it out of the game, but has no illusions about the possibility of it.

“People who create these rules, they want a contest, they want a fair contest,” he said. “At the point where everyone’s doing this, and it always works, is the point where people start to look at it. I’m not suggesting that’s a good idea, mind you, I think we’re a ways away from it. But that’s how it works right? I mean, if there’s a point where one side, or the other, has this distinct advantage, they typically change those rules.”

The question of whether the league will officially address the tush push in any capacity will have to wait until the offseason, when the league’s rules committee meets to discuss some things. Until then, it’s up to teams facing the Eagles, such as the Niners on Sunday, to figure out how exactly to prevent this play from becoming a significant factor in their matchup. One thing is for certain, according to Clark: Just because this play came from someone in rugby, it doesn’t mean that the way to stop it will necessarily come from a similar source.

“I don’t know that you could call up 100 rugby guys, ‘Oh, I know how to stop that,’ I think they’d all be being very disingenuous,” Clark said. “We can’t stop that in our own game.”