Goin' OG

 So I see by the interwhatsis that an unidentified NFL team has called for the banning of the tush push, which is back in the news now because the Philadelphia Eagles just won the Super Bowl and are most famous (notorious?) for the play they call the Brotherly Shove.

And now I can hear Willie Heston and Pudge Heffelfinger and that whole crowd, having a big guffaw out there in the celestial void.

"The Brotherly Shove?" they're chortling. "Hell, man, that ain't nothin' but football."

And so it is. Or was, long, long ago when the Hestons and Heffelfingers played and the game was as primitive as stone knives and bearskins.

We're talking the 1890s, early 1900s here, when football was the sole province of your Yales and Harvards and Princetons, with an occasional Michigan or Notre Dame thrown in to make it look national. No one had invented the forward pass yet. The wishbone was a wish dream. The triple option was still missing two of 'em, and even the off-tackle run was regarded as exotic and therefore suspect.

No, sir. Football at the turn of the last century?

It basically was just a bunch of guys surrounding another guy and shoving him forward until they couldn't shove him forward anymore.

A century and a quarter later, you saw the Eagles do the exact same thing in the Super Bowl.

Lined up some big guys behind Jalen Hurts. Shoved him over the goal line/past the first down marker. A play as OG as Grover Cleveland, and as elemental as force and mass and the application of the latter to enhance the former.

That's all football was in those prehistoric days, when the flying wedge was a revolutionary act and players went by colorful names like Tack and Belf and Pudge, and of course the immortal T. Truxton Hare, who lined up for Penn during the McKinley administration. Protective gear was either unknown or for sissies in those days, which is why a pile of players died and the flying wedge was eventually outlawed. That, too, was football then.

Now it's all these years later, and we're still arguing about the flying wedge's spiritual descendant, the tush push.

The risk of injury, some people say, makes the play dangerous (sound familiar?). On the other hand, it's an extremely effective throwback; the numbers say the Eagles and Buffalo Bills have run the tush push 163 times, and have gotten a touchdown or first down out of it 87 percent of the time.

And now I can hear Willie and Pudge 'n' them again, having another big guffaw.

"Hell, yes, it works 87 percent of the time," they're chortling. "Why do you think we did it?"

A pause. 

"And we didn't have any of these fancy-dan helmets and pads and junk like that. We were football players, man, not a buncha nancy boys."

More guffaws, echoing down the years.