The Eagles got away with false starting on the tush push Sunday against the Chiefs. The league office is trying to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
The league’s training video for officials, which also gets shared with coaches and general managers, included video showing the Eagles false starting and an instruction that the officials ensure the offense isn’t getting away with penalties on the tush push, according to Mark Maske of the Washington Post.
“Any time we have this situation we’re in short yardage, we know we want to make sure that we officiate these plays — the offensive team has to be perfect in every aspect,” Ramon George, the NFL’s vice president of officiating training and development, said in the video. “We want to officiate it tight. We want to be black and white and be as tight as we can be when we get into this situation where teams are in the bunch position and we have to officiate them being onsides, movement early. … Prior to the snap, looks like we have movement by the right guard. We also have movement coming across from the defensive side. This is a very hard play to officiate. I get it.”
The training video made clear that an Eagles tush push should have been blown dead before the snap and the Eagles should have been backed up five yards.
“You can see the right guard moves early,” George said as an Eagles tush push was shown in the training video. “You’ve got your defender who’s trying to punch the ball. But more so, we have a false start coming from the right guard. We want to make sure that we officiate these plays tight and make sure that every aspect of the offensive team is legal and any movement . . . that’s not correct, we want to shut it down as a false start. False start would be the proper call here.”
An attempt to change the rules to make it illegal for a teammate to push a ball carrier failed during the offseason when 22 teams voted in favor of it, two short of the three-fourths majority needed to change a playing rule. But the officials need to enforce the rules that are in place, and on Sunday, they didn’t.
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