The Detroit Lions have a mega game against the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday Night Football this weekend, and everyone is going to be talking about it. This is one of those games that everyone has been wanting to see for at least the last two seasons, and it just hasn’t happened for one reason or another. Now that it’s hear, everyone seems to want to talk about one thing, and that’s the Tush Push. It’s been asked of Lions head coach Dan Campbell a bunch of times already this week.

“…Every team can say they’ve got something, and then they run it on everybody and have success,” Campbell said. “They’ve mastered it. They play with leverage. They know the snap count, and then they got a couple of curveballs off of it. So, you know, you’ve got to be careful. If it’s an all-out sell-out with 11 people, then they’re off on the perimeter, but we’ve talked, we’ve got a plan, we’ve got an idea, but, you know, you got to execute.”

I get this is a big thing and everyone likes to talk about it, but should this really be a concern for the Lions? Should it even be near the top of the list of concerns? I talked with our Eagles beat writer, Kelsey Kramer, about it, and here’s what she had to say:

The Eagles don’t run the tush push all that often, and their efficiency with it has dropped steadily

“Ah, yes, the endless Tush Push ban debate lives on, but it doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon. The Eagles are not running the play they’re so dominant at as much, but that’s been a common theme every year since 2022. This year, they’ve run the Tush Push at least 20 times. But their conversion rate of 76.5% is down from last year’s % 82.1%. That’s also a dip from 83.3% in 2023 and 92.6$ in 2022.”

So maybe the Eagles will run it a couple of times on the Lions, but they’re not succeeding on it as much as they used to. Along with that, the Eagles are having some trouble converting on the later downs. They’re converting on third down just 34.7% of the time. That’s 27th in the league. We’re not talking about the tush push here; we’re talking in general. On fourth down, they convert 68.8% of the time, but that’s off 16 attempts. So they’re going to go for it if it’s short. The Lions need ot make sure that they can manage well on the early downs and don’t let them dink and dunk their way down the field a few yards and four downs at a time.

If the Lions can do that and also do their best to take Saquon Barkley out of the conversation, the tush push won’t matter at all.

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