The Scotsman who helped the Eagles perfect the tush push: ‘Nobody else is doing what I do'

New York Times

a day ago

'Nobody else in the world is doing what I do,' Richie Gray tells The Athletic from his office in Galashiels, a small town in the Scottish Borders, about an hour south of the country's capital, Edinburgh.
Gray is the Scotsman who helped innovate a football play the Philadelphia Eagles have made so effective that NFL owners were two votes away from banning it last month. No doubt teams across the league are likely wishing the Eagles had never hired the 55-year-old in the summer of 2023.
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Thanks to the tush push/Brotherly Shove, a modern twist on the quarterback sneak, the Eagles are almost unstoppable in short-yardage situations. Even acclaimed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said so.
At Super Bowl LIX against the back-to-back champion Kansas City Chiefs, the Eagles were perched on the goal line in the first quarter. It was little surprise when they opted for their most reliable, will-breaking play.
Their star-studded offensive line moved as one in a low phalanx and quarterback Jalen Hurts followed into the endzone, assisted by two pushers on each side of the buttocks. The rest, as they say, is history, a triumphant denouement to the season.
But how did a former rugby union player from a Scottish town with a population of around 12,000 help create the NFL's most successful play?
Gray has become the go-to guy for everything contact and collision, he says, providing methodology, analysis, and equipment. He largely worked in the shadows until the Kelce brothers' New Heights podcast a few years ago.
In a September 2023 episode, Philadelphia's serial All-Pro center Jason Kelce put on a 'very good Scottish accent,' according to Gray, to impersonate the 'Scottish guy' who had discussed how to stop the tush push with Jeff Stoutland, the revered Eagles offensive line coach and run game coordinator.
As the only Scot with a rugby background coaching in the NFL, people quickly connected the dots, and calls came in from his friends across the league to find out details. However, the specifics of his input remain an industry secret.
'I was back at the Eagles about six months after that. I went back and had a good catch-up with him (Kelce). I'm glad I did, because he's now retired and he's a great guy. A real football man, a great sense of humor, and just a good person to be around,' Gray says.
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Gray played rugby union for his hometown club Gala Rugby and Caledonia Reds, the now defunct professional Scottish regional team, before embarking on a coaching career across the U.S., France, Fiji, and more.
Alongside 10 days out of the month being the skills and contact collision specialist for rugby union club Toulon, who finished third in France's Top 14, Gray is at the beck and call of NFL teams.
He has written the handbook on tackling methodology for USA Football, the national governing body, and was brought in at the Eagles to work with the defensive coaches.
This came about after receiving a phone call from an Eagles defensive assistant coach, Tyler Scudder, as Gray knew the team's director of sports performance at the time, Ted Rath, from Rath's previous job at the Miami Dolphins. Stoutland reserved him a couple of days before arriving to look at the tush push, to advise how he would break it up and improve the play.
'I've spent the last 20 years working on how to move bodies: angles, force, height, weight, you name it,' Gray says. 'So on watching it we kind of ripped the whole play to bits and built it back up again, and out of that conversation, I'm sure there were two or three things the group took and added to the play.
'The play is over three levels, firstly, the offensive line. You've got some phenomenal O-line athletes at the Eagles, one of the heaviest in the league, some huge humans. You've then got Jalen Hurts, who is pound-for-pound one of the strongest quarterbacks in the league, so the play is completely made for his body type.' Hurts squatted 600 pounds (272 kilograms) while in college at Alabama.
'Then you've got two players in behind him who actually don't add that much at all in the push. It's called the push, but if you watch it, there's actually not a lot of pushing involved in it. It's thought of as a pushing play, but a lot of the time, those two back pushers never get to Hurts. The job's done before then. I always class it as organised mass.'
Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni first ran the quarterback sneak while offensive coordinator at the Indianapolis Colts in week 10 of the 2020 season. He introduced it at the Eagles in 2021, devoting hours of practice to perfecting it, which is where Gray came in.
The Eagles ran their quarterback 122 times in 1-yard-to-go situations since 2022, scoring 30 touchdowns and gaining an additional 75 first downs on those plays, according to TruMedia. SharpFootballAnalysis says Philadelphia have been successful 90 percent of the time in quarterback sneak and tush push situations with one-yard to go since 2022.
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'It's kind of like a cheapo play,' Washington Commanders linebacker Frankie Luvu said last month on NFL Network's Good Morning Football. In trying to stop the tush push, Luvu was penalized three consecutive times for encroachment after jumping over the line before the snap during January's NFC title game.
After the Green Bay Packers submitted a revised rule change proposal in May calling for offensive players to be prohibited from 'pushing, pulling, lifting, or assisting the runner except by individually blocking opponents for him,' the NFL's competition and health and safety committees recommended banning the play, but NFL owners voted for it to remain. Needing 24 votes (75 percent) for the ban to be enforced, the proposal received 22 votes from the 32 owners.
Kelce, who was crucial to the play before retiring after the 2023 season, spoke to the owners before voting began. Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie had addressed assembled owners for more than 30 minutes, while Sirianni said banning the play would be 'unfair.'
Gray is familiar with rule change processes, having been invited to speak to all owners and head coaches about the hip drop tackle, which was banned in March 2024 with research showing it to cause lower-body injuries at a rate 20 times higher than other tackles.
Banning the tush push was not something Gray agreed with, however.
'You got to see why do they want this play to be removed,' Gray says. 'It is because one team is incredibly good at it and the other teams are not, so it's giving them a competitive advantage. If you ban it for that reason, then you are pretty much banning innovation.'
Despite the health and safety committee recommending to ban it there has been little data to show that there have been injuries on the play.
'I think it's because it's more a surge than it is somebody running from 25 meters into a brick wall and there's a lot of technique involved so in some ways it was a surprise they wanted to try and ban it,' says Gray.
The 10 teams to vote against a ban included the Baltimore Ravens, Detroit Lions, New England Patriots, and New York Jets. 'There will be some defensive coordinators that will be desperately keen to try and break this. Other teams may think it's impossible to break,' Gray adds.
His association with the tush push, and with Eagles left tackle Jordan Mailata, the Australian former rugby league player, has had the move mislabeled, in Gray's opinion, as a rugby play.
'It's an incredibly technical play. It's funny, I was at the Health and Safety summit in Orlando last month, and a lot of football people there were saying it's just a mass of bodies smashing each other, and I said, 'Guys, seriously? Have you looked at this play?'
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'You have got to be powerful, power's always going to help, but if your technique is not aligned with your power, it will be stopped.'
Despite American football having its origins in rugby, Gray sees few similarities between the sports, other than the ball being roughly the same size, both including attack and defense, and tackling a ball carrier to the ground.
In rugby union, there are 15 players on each side and a game is 80 minutes. NFL games are 11-a-side and last 60 minutes.
The set pieces also differ. A scrum in rugby, which is used to re-start a game after a minor penalty, is pre-bound so all eight forwards from each team bind before adding force only once the referee has restarted play. A rugby maul — when teammates bind to the ball carrier and push forward on their feet — becomes very tightly bound.
In a tush push, players have different individual roles and responsibilities. In the NFL, players cannot interlock their hands and arms while blocking.
'American football is a five-second explosion, whereas rugby union, you could play for 40 seconds, 60 seconds, 120, and still be going through phase after phase. So rugby players would struggle to adapt to football and vice versa,' Gray explains.
Gray's first gig in the NFL was with the Dolphins in 2016. He was taught what he describes as the the game 'everybody loves but no one understands (outside of the U.S.)' by great minds like Vance Joseph, now Denver Broncos defensive coordinator, Matt Burke, currently defensive coordinator at the Houston Texans, and Ken O'Keefe, who most recently served as University of Iowa's quarterbacks coach from 2017 to 2021.
Gray has developed a league-wide reputation through his equipment and coaching. His Global Sports Innovation (GSI) Performance equipment, consisting of 52 products that are training aids for collision sports, is stocked across rugby and by 23 NFL franchises, distributed in the U.S., Canada, and South America through Riddell, the NFL's helmet supplier.
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As we talk, he mentions an upcoming job with the New York Giants.
Much has changed since he was at the Eagles, who he occasionally revisits, in 2023. The addition of running back Saquon Barkley — and his subsequently historic 2024 season — proved the missing piece as Philadelphia muscled their way to their second Super Bowl in seven years. And despite the attempt to ban it, the tush push has taken on a life of its own.
'There's a huge amount of decoys off the back of it. So it's become like a play within a play. Everybody's so focused on what's going to happen here, and then all of a sudden somebody runs around the back,' says Gray. 'The snap count can be a real problem, too, because defenders try to beat the count by diving over the top.'
Gray watched the Eagles' convincing 40-22 win over the Chiefs from the comfort of his own home. He slept easily knowing his contribution had made a telling impact throughout the season.
'I'm sure I was working early the next morning, so I couldn't stay up right through the night,' he recalls. 'And ironically, I stayed up because I think they scored a touchdown off the shove. It was the first touchdown they scored. So literally, I watched that (up until half-time), and I thought, right, that'll do me. I'm off to my bed.'
(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Photos via Getty Images)