Jason Kelce said it was a “wild experience” being in a room full of NFL owners earlier this week in Minnesota.
Kelce joined the Eagles’ brass on Wednesday as owners decided the fate of the Tush Push. Ultimately, the Packers' proposal to ban it fell just two votes shy and the Eagles will be able to use their signature play again in 2025.
On Friday morning, Kelce explained his perspective on the experience to the 94WIP Morning Show.
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SIGN UP HERE “Dude, I’m in a room with all these owners and billionaires and you’re seeing take place the legislative process of the NFL and the game of football in a lot of ways,” Kelce said. “It was awesome to just see how the proposals work, how guys take the floor, there’s back and forth. Roger (Goodell) is obviously leading everything and then there’s the committees and Dr. Allen Sills and the health aspects of it. I really enjoyed the entire thing.
“It felt really surreal to even be in that room. It was like I was in some inner sanctum. I don’t know if the Illuminati is real but I feel like that room really is close to that. It was wild. It was wild.”
Kelce, 37, said he entered that room expecting the play to be banned based on what he was hearing publicly. But he said that changed once he entered the meeting room. He isn’t sure if he or Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie swayed any votes, but based on the back-and-forth in the room, he doesn’t think every voter had their mind made up before the meeting.
Kelce explained that he attended the meeting to set the record straight on his own experience with the play. After the owners meetings in late March, there were reports that there was talk in the room that Kelce retired in part because of the toll the Tush Push had on his body.
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That wasn’t the case. So Kelce went to Minnesota to answer questions and give his view on the play.
“I was there to tell them, ‘Listen, it’s a grueling play,’” Kelce said. “‘I’m not going to negate that.’ There’s a lot of energy expenditure. You have some of the biggest and best athletes in the world competing for sometimes less than a yard. Like 6 inches. And it’s so impactful.
“But there’s no momentum buildup so it ends up just being energy assertion and pushing. It’s not high-impact. This isn’t a play where you’re going to see these large, large injuries on in my opinion because it’s just not what it is. I have a much better chance of getting hurt out in the open running full speed with a lot of momentum and pace as opposed to being right next to somebody and just pushing as hard as I can.”
Kelce said Lurie “went very strong” in his lengthy speech to fellow owners and said Lurie’s main point centered around the potential safety issues with the play.
When asked how tense the meeting became, Kelce ranked it a 7 on a scale of 1-10 but said the mood eventually lightened again.
“It was really tense,” Kelce said. “It was really tense after Jeffrey went because of how passionate he was. I’m never in those meetings so I don’t know how typical it is that it gets that way.
“But I think that it was tense because Jeffrey is passionate and he made his point clear and known. And felt like the Eagles had not really been a part of the process along the way. He felt like his perspective and the Eagles’ perspective had been left out and I think he made that known to the league.”
Even though Kelce was in the meeting and might have helped save the play (for at least another year), he didn’t find out the results of the vote any earlier than the rest of us. He actually found out in a text from Jordan Mailata: “Thanks for your service. Another year of pushing tush.”