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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3426 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 12, 2023

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It's likely that the Hurts QB Push is going to be made illegal next year, for example, because it's such a wild cheat code for the Eagles all season.

CFB pleb here. What’s wrong with the QB push? Is this different from a sneak? Getting rid of that in cfb would seem wild to me. So many 4th and goals would turn into kicks without it.

The Eagles, through a mix of having essentially the pro-bowl offensive line, a QB who squats 600lbs and will do anything to win, and tremendous full team buy-in, call a QB sneak and get 2-3 guys behind Hurts who push him into the line scrum style. Hurts is the ball carrier, but in a very real sense he just curls up and becomes the ball, with 2-3 guys behind and 2-3 guys in front doing the actual moving.

It amounted to a cheat code for a lot of the season to get 1-2 yards automatically. Where that might get banned:

  1. Physical toll, or a public perception of the physical toll. It's actually relatively unlikely to result in injury, it is the big open field hits that do the worst damage, but it looks brutal and the NFL might not like that. QBs who aren't physical specimens might or might not use the NFLPA to bring this up.

  2. Changing strategy. The Eagles had a LOT of boring wins, part of which was that they could run the ball for 3 yards on 1st-3rd downs, and then push on 4th. I think 4 down football makes the game more exciting personally, but I could see teams complaining that it allowed the Eagles to just sit on 7-14 point leads and smother the game rather than play aggressively or give the ball back to the other team.

  3. Aesthetics. Some NFL magnates might not like how it looks. Just flat out think it is ugly, unentertaining, bad for the TV brand.

Its a maul rather than a scrum, probably (maul has a player with the ball being shoved forward by his pack, scrum has the ball at the feet of the players while the packs try to push each other back). I think the current rules for mauls are once forward momentum is arrested you have 5 seconds to make another push or work the ball free or they call the ball dead.

A ruck would be interesting in American Football (player goes to ground, ball behind him and your forwards push over the top, basically), and maybe legal? You can choose to fumble the ball gently behind you while your offensive line push over and you recover the controlled fumble from behind them? You'd have to drop the ball before you went down, unlike in rugby where you can place it behind you, generally.

Changing strategy. The Eagles had a LOT of boring wins, part of which was that they could run the ball for 3 yards on 1st-3rd downs, and then push on 4th. I think 4 down football makes the game more exciting personally, but I could see teams complaining that it allowed the Eagles to just sit on 7-14 point leads and smother the game rather than play aggressively or give the ball back to the other team.

One could argue that this is just because 4 downs make football boring...

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