The Man Behind the Tush Push

[MUSIC]

BROADCASTER 1: Super Bowl 57 starts now.

BROADCASTER 2: The Chiefs won the coin toss, they’ve deferred, the Eagles will receive in Spanish language broadcast.

RICHIE GRAY: I’ve got an office here, so I spend quite a lot of time doing analysis and, you know, obviously rugby, but I watch a lot football as well and I obviously work with quite a number of players and coaches and teams over the time, so a big screen behind me which is great and I sit and watch that, so, I sat and watched it, now it was a late night because I was then working the next day.

DAVID GREENE, HOST: It is after midnight in the little town of Galashiels in Scotland, but Richie Gray can’t sleep. His eyes are glued to the television. The Super Bowl is on, and it’s the Philadelphia Eagles against the reigning champs, the Kansas City Chiefs. And while most people in Scotland might not care much about American football, Richie Gray is not most people. He needed to stay awake, at least until he saw what he wanted to see. One specific play from the Eagles.

RG: I knew it was gonna come at some time.

DG: The play that Richie was waiting for, it’s called the Brotherly Shove, also known as the Tush Push, also known as the adapted quarterback sneak. If you’ve watched the Eagles play even a single drive of football in the last, oh, three years, you’ve probably seen this. The quarterback, in this case, Jalen Hurts, takes the snap, and the offensive line charges forward. And then the players behind Hurts seem to push him over the line to get a first down or to score.

BROADCASTER 3: If this season, if the tendency of this Philadelphia team, I mean, how many quarterback sneaks have we seen them run? Jason Kelce in center, kind of rugby style, scrum, and getting underneath. You have to think from the half-yard line; it’s got to be at the top of this call sheet.

DG: In this game, the Super Bowl, the Eagles found an early opportunity for this dependable play. It’s midway through the first quarter, and Philly’s offense is set up right at the goal line. If they can push Jalen Hurts forward by just one yard, they’ll earn their first six points and take the lead.

ANNOUNCER 1: Jalen Hurts is 30 for 34 on quarterback sneaks. An insane number. We’ll see if they go for it. First and goal.

ANNOUNCER 2: Yeah, we got a lot of big bodies in there. Take a look how many guys are inside there.

DG: This is their moment. Viewers everywhere are on pins and needles, wondering, will this be the first touchdown of the Super Bowl? Can the Eagles pull this off? Oh, come on, who are we kidding? Of course they can.

ANNOUNCER 3: Surging forward is Hurts, and so there you go. It is a touchdown. Hurts on the quarterback sneak. He gritties off to the sidelines and another opening drive for a touchdown for Philly

DG: Look, I’m not even an Eagles fan, but I mean, come on, this is the Tush Push we’re talking about. And it sure seems to always work. From 2022, when the Eagles first tried it all the way through that 2025 Super Bowl game, they have scored 30 touchdowns on this play alone and gained 75 first downs. That is precisely what is so frustrating about it. And all the way from Scotland, Richie was thrilled to see it work in the biggest game of the year.

RG: I watched it up to pretty much when they scored from the Brotherly Shove, and I think it was one of the first touchdowns that they got.

DG: After that, he says he could finally go up to bed.

RG: It was good to see it, you know, and it was a good way to sort of, finishing off the season, and don’t get me wrong I didn’t really go to sleep after that because I kept checking my phone I would kind of doze off then waking up and do the code and up it would come with a score.

DG: But why was this small-town Scotsman so insistent on seeing the tushbush succeed? Well, that is because, if you can believe it, Richie himself helped the Eagles create it. I mean, wouldn’t you stay up to see your own play win the Super Bowl?

RG: That gives me as much of a buzz as anything else, you know? To see that play and the way that it evolved, and how difficult it was to stop, and the difference it made to the Eagles.

[THEME MUSIC]

DG: From WHYY and PRX, this is Sports in America. I’m David Greene, and today we are talking to Richie Gray. You might not know his name, but if you’re a football fan, you have seen his impact. He acts all humble about it, but he helped design the most successful and most controversial play in football right now, the tush push. With Richie’s advice, the Eagles turned this play into a Super Bowl-winning strategy. It’s been so successful that it raised alarm bells all over the country and was just two votes away from getting banned entirely by the NFL. Before all that, though, Richie grew up playing rugby. He followed in his dad’s footsteps, becoming an internationally known coach. He since made a career of consulting with NFL teams to sharpen their defensive skills and make on-field collisions safer so that players are able to live full lives after their careers are over. Richie’s tackling equipment is now used by more than half the teams in the NFL, and he wrote the handbook on tackling methodology for USA Football. In this episode, we are talking about the Tush Push. We’re gonna bring you the science, the construction behind the most effective and maddening play in the history of football. Why does this play always seem to work? Is it technically cheating? And how did Richie get involved in the first place?

Well, I wanna kind of roll back the clock and talk about your journey to become this person who is associated with maybe the most famous play in the NFL right now. I mean, even non-NFL fans. You say Tush Push…

RG: Well, it’s certainly the most talked about, David.(Laughs) It’s certainly most talked-about, you know.

DG: You grew up in a small community in Scotland, right?
[BIRDS CHIRPING]

RG: I’m from a small town in the Scottish borders about an hour and ten minutes south of Edinburgh called Galashiels, called Gala, the towns are about eight to twelve thousand people there’s about nine or ten towns spread out over you know I would say most towns about a four miles six miles apart so really small towns, big farmland area, rolling hills, it’s a phenomenal place to grow up, but it’s well known for rugby. So this is a huge rugby area. A lot of players, a lot of coaches have come here, world-class players, world-class coaches have come from this area. It’s just, it’s had that sort of culture behind it. So born and brought up here and then, you know, went through, and then I became a PE teacher. I actually went to university, college to study physical education. So I was always gonna be a PE teacher, physical education teacher. And then one thing led to another, rugby went professional. I ended up going into rugby, coaching rugby 10, 12 years. My father was a great coach. So you were always brought up in the sort of whole world of contact and collision.

DG: Oh, so you watched your dad coaching rugby growing up?

RG: Yeah, oh yeah, my father coached for many years, coached the district team, so it was like coaching the provincial side. My father coached that side, so it was a team with some phenomenally famous players in it. If you were in and around Scottish rugby, you would know them all. So you were kind of brought up in that environment. And then I went into rugby myself, development, academy development, coach education.

DG: Raised as a rugby kid, Richie soon became enamored with the American version of the sport.

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RG: The NFL to me was like the, that was the pinnacle of all American sport.

BROADCASTER: The National Broadcasting Company Presents, the National Football League.

RG: You know, I’d grown up watching Miami Dolphins, Chicago Bears, Mike Ditka…

ANNOUNCER 1: Pass to Mike Ditka

RG: Dan Marino…

ANNOUNCER 2: Dan Marino touchdown!

RG: Because they used to show one game on a Sunday night in Scotland. It started about 10 o’clock at night. So, this was in the 80s, the Fridge…

ANNOUNCER 3: The Frdige is in for the touchdown.

RG: Joe Theismann, Washington Redskins, Walter Payton…

ANNOUNCER 4: Wide open!

RG: Marcus Allen…

DG: Wow, you are an NFL fan early, and so you only got one game a week, like whatever 10 p.m. game, it was on a Sunday?

RG: One game on a Sunday night on channel four, I can remember it, and I must have been about 10- 11 years old then, Eric Dickerson, I can remember, and they were just phenomenal athletes

DG: What did you like about American football? Like, I mean, you have rugby, you have soccer, obviously. Like, what captured your imagination about the NFL?

RG: This is going to sound crazy, but it was Americanified.

ANNOUNCER 5: Down the sidelines, oh yeah! Mike V.

RG: It was color, it was numbers, it was music, it was crazy helmets, it was you know strips that look phenomenal, there was cheerleaders, it was just like a different world.

ANNOUNCER 6: And look at that offensive step.

DG: It was a show.

RG: Yeah, it was a show, it’s a show. And I just loved it, but I also loved, and I always used to say this, and I’ve said this all my life, about American football, it was like human chess played at 100 kilometers an hour by the biggest, most powerful athletes on the planet. And I’ve never changed my philosophy on that. It’s about millimeters, you know, the old classic, it is a game of inches, it is a game of inches.

DG: Richie loved the whole production of American football, but coming from the world of rugby, there was one thing that struck him about it.

RG: But I just always used to think, and not when I was 10 or 12 years old, it was when I later on in life, and you’d spent a lot of time involved with sports science and conditioning and looking at technique and accuracy. I always used to think that I thought the players could be more accurate.

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RG: They used to slip off a lot of tackles. I was brought up in tackling. That was the whole world that you worked in. No pads, bone on bone from five, six years old. But you became incredibly accurate.

DG: Oh, so in rugby, you’re not wearing pads. And so, I mean, you have to protect yourself. So the accuracy, the science of it is more important.

RG: Yeah, when we played, there was no, there’s now a thin layer of padding you’re allowed to wear if you want. Most guys don’t wear it. We were never brought up at all with helmets and padding. You could wear a scrum cap, it was called. It was like a foam, sort of half an inch thick. And you wore it usually when you were coming back from being stitched on your head, or you’d had your ear ripped. You would wear that for maybe a couple of weeks until everything healed up, then.

DG: I love that you say ear ripped just so casually. It’s just like, yeah, that time that I had my ear ripped off, yeah, you gotta heal from that.

RG: Both of mine have been torn, so, you know.

DG: Really?

RG: It was just strap it up and off you went. So, you’d wear the helmet for a couple of games, get yourself back into it, and then the helmet would come off, you know, so. It’s just, it fascinated me, American football. I loved it, absolutely loved it. It used to be called gridiron, you know?

DG: Yeah, of course.

RG: The old name was gridiron in the UK. And then obviously it’s now, you know, football.

DG: I’m really fascinated about this. You got interested in bringing the kind of the precision and accuracy of tackling and hitting from rugby, whether we’re not pads to the NFL, where you were just seeing too many guys just like bounce off each other and not have to worry about their safety because they, you know, they had pads, even though obviously safety is a big concern still.

RG: I think what used to happen, David, is because they had this sort of force field round about them, they could throw themselves, and don’t get me wrong, if they hit you, you knew all about it and you’d be knocked on your backside, but so many times I saw players slip off and I thought, you know why, where’s the wrap, where is the grip, where the clamp, Where’s the acceleration feet? Where’s that the laser focus, and I couldn’t work it out because I thought you’ve got phenomenal athletes here, why are they not accurate, as well as being a phenomenal athlete? And it wasn’t until I really started to look at the sport in depth and then get across to the US and started working in the NFL that you used to find, and it was an honest call at least to say to players, you know, you could be 1% better, you can be 5% better it could be 10% better. You know, the defensive side of the ball, as you know, if you’re more accurate, one, you’re gonna be worth more money. Two, and the most important thing, you’re going to keep yourself healthy and safe. You’re not gonna get injury.

DG: Richie got into coaching rugby teams all over the world. The first time he got to bring his expertise to an actual NFL team was 10 years ago when a team caught wind of his success on the pitch. So your first experience working with an NFL team was about a decade ago and it was the Miami Dolphins, is that right?

RG: 2015, David, 2015, I was coaching South Africa, and we were in the semi-final of the World Cup in London. It was the World Cup was held…

DG: South African rugby?

RG: Yeah, in rugby.

DG: Okay.

RG: We were playing New Zealand, and I got a phone call out of the blue from an old physiotherapist who I’d known for years, called Wayne Diesel, great name. He was head of performance at Miami Dolphins. And he said, “Listen, we’ll be looking at all the stats and stuff, and we saw that you’re coaching South Africa. Would you ever consider coming down and working with our coaches for a week just on tackle technique? And we’re trying to bring some new things into our training.” And by complete chance, I’d just finished developing a number of tackling training aids. So I said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you fly those training aids down, I’ll come down, and I’ll quite happily work with you, and I will take you through the stages.” And that was where it all started, and that was in 2015, so you’re looking at 10 years ago, 10 years I’ve been doing it now, and back and forward across the old ocean and the plane, and I’ve been all over the place now. (Laughs)

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DG: Something you should know about working with the NFL, though, it’s all very secretive. Most of the time, when a team brings in Richie to help with a play, he says he’s not even allowed to talk about it.

RG: A lot of times, I don’t want to tell anybody who I’m working with because, as you know, NFL and college is possibly the most secretive place you could ever go, so nobody wants anybody to know anything else. So I don’t sign NDAs or anything like that, but from an integrity point of view, if I work with a player here, I don’t discuss what I’ve done with that player to a player that’s in another part of the country. If I have a Zoom call with a coach from Arizona Cardinals. I’m not going to then say to the coach I have a Zoom call with from the Raiders, “Oh I was speaking to this coach and that…”

DG: So it’s like attorney-client privilege or something like that. You’re treating it like you’re a lawyer in a way.

RG: Yeah, totally. That’s exactly what it is. I think that’s why you’ve done so well in the US is nobody will ever know where you’ve actually been or what you’ve done.

DG: This unspoken rule was also true back in 2023, when the Eagles coaching staff first brought Richie in to help them hone their defensive plays. But then a big mouth on the team made the partnership go very public. More on that coming up next on Sports in America.

[MIDROLL]

DG: Welcome back to Sports in America. I’m David Greene. When Richie Gray started working with the Philadelphia Eagles, he did a good job keeping it under wraps, but there was one person in the organization who didn’t seem to get the memo.

RG: The only reason that my name got linked to the Eagles, because I’d never said anything, (Laughs) was Jason Kelce.

DG: Jason Kelce. He outed you, former Eagle Center, his podcast, which has a pretty big following, outed that you were working with his team. Didn’t he use like a Scottish accent? Like on the podcast?

JASON KELCE: But this Scottish guy came in, and Stoutland was like, you know, “What would you do to try and stop this?” Like, “How would you stop this play?” And the guy says, well, let me see if I can do my best Scottish impression. He says, “Coach, there ain’t nothing you can do to stop it. It’s organized mess.”

DG: That’s right, Jason Kelce let it slip on his podcast, New Heights, that the Eagles were working with a quote, Scottish guy. And with Richie being probably the only Scottish guy in the NFL at the time, well, people cracked the case.

RG: It was superb, and it was funny. I didn’t have a clue about it, and one of my guys that I know in the US said, “Richie, you’re gonna love this.” He said, “I’m forwarding this to you, have a listen.” And I mean, it was a Saturday morning. I was lying upstairs. It was early. I did have the phone in my room again. So, off it went, and I looked at this. Well, I just, I was ending myself, because it was a pretty good Scottish accent, actually.

DG: Jason Kelsey, really?

RG: Yeah, it’s a good one. I thought he did a good job. Really, the whole thing there, you know, sometimes arms and legs can be added to everything, but I was actually brought in by the Eagles through Ted Rath, who was head of performance.

DG: By Richie’s account, former VP of player performance for the Eagles, Ted Rath, brought him in to work with the team on the thing he knows best, defense and tackle technique. But then the coaching staff had another idea.

RG: I’m not an offensive guy at all, but they knew I was in the building, so Coach Stoutland comes through and said, “Listen, tomorrow morning, we’d like you to join the offensive coaches. We’re going to be having a sort of brainstorm, and we want to show you a play, and we’d like your idea on how you would break it defensively.” It was a great call, you know, and that’s why he’s one of the best coaches in the world because he was thinking outside the box a little bit, so.

DG: So this is Jeff Stoutland, who’s the offensive line coach for the Eagles. He brings you in and says, I want to show you this play and see how you would come up with a way to stop it.

RG: How would you break it down? And also, would you add anything to it?

DG: That was Richie’s role. Jeff Stoutland, who’s the Eagles’ run game coordinator and offensive line coach, wanted Richie to watch the team perform the Tush Push, which at the time Richie just saw as a variation of the classic quarterback sneak. And then he had to prep the team, brainstorming all the ways that the best defenses in the league might try to stop them. In other words, Richie had to make the play unstoppable.

[MUSIC]

RG: So we spent the full morning, the whole group, sort of going through it and looking at different angles and force, and there was a few bits and pieces that, you know, we had a good discussion about it, and that was the start. It’s just an incredibly well-constructed play and I think, you, know, a lot of it comes down to angles and forces and power but, and I say this to any, you now, non-sort of football person that asks me about it, is you’ve got to remember in football O-line, D-line there’s one massive help is it’s action will always beat reaction and the O- line have the chance they start the snap they’ve got the count they know what they’re doing so the D-liner always a millisecond behind that and sometimes that’s enough to you know make it incredibly difficult to defend. And here’s the classic David, right, and this is what really gets me the most. In all the social media and the discussion around this QB Sneak play, QB sneak play is not new; it’s been around for many years. The Eagles are just better at it than everybody else.

DG: Early on in the life of the Tush Push, there was this misconception about the play that Ritchie had adapted it from his time in rugby. He says that’s just not the case.

RG: They classed it as a rugby-type play; it’s rugby. It’s nowhere near rugby, right? And I can say this quite openly.

DG: Oh, the Tush Push is not a rugby play?

RG: Not a rugby play, 100% not a rugby play, and I’ll tell you why.

DG: Because you hear that everywhere. I mean, everyone’s talking about that, including putting your name with it, saying obviously this guy, Richie, came and designed this play.

RG: They put two and two together, and they think, right, Richy Gray, rugby, boom.

DG: Well, it sounds like we need to break a few things down. So, first of all, you did not invent this play. I mean, IP is important, like it was Jeff Stoutland brought you this play?

RG: Yeah, play has been around for years.

DG: Okay. So Jeff Stalin brought you this, the idea of this Brotherly Shove and you sort of helped him fine-tune it and and work on it.

RG: Yeah.

DG: And okay. So that’s number one. That’s important. And number two is, is not a rugby play. These are the lies, the lies of the tush push that we’re being transparent about it.

RG: (Laughs) Well, the thing is, and I just sit back here, and I don’t get involved in it much, so you sit back, and you listen to what’s all been said. A rugby play, you’ve got to remember, it looks like a scrum, it looks a maul. A scrum’s pre-bound, right…

DG: Pre-bind means you’re linking arms with other players, right?

RG: Scrum linked already.

DG: Okay.

RG: The maul we’re getting closer to it so that’s usually when players then join to push but even if you look at the way the QB sneaks set up there’s very little binding in it you know there’s no binding at all and also NFL O-Line is not allowed to bind before the play so there’s a massive discrepancy there it’s actually not a rugby play it’s a football play and there’s key things going on within that play that make it incredibly football orientated. But because your name was attached to it and, you know, it must come from rugby, it’s not a rugby play, it’s a football play, 100%.

DG: Well, what are the biomechanics of it that make it so hard to stop? I know you said the Eagles just do it well, but there’s got to be something in the design that also makes it really, really effective.

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RG: The thing is, it’s got so many different things you can do off it now, because it’s incredibly difficult, one, to defend if it’s done properly, and then two, you’ve gotta keep all your focus on that power coming through the middle, but if you switch off to what’s going on on the outsides, they can catch you there, then if you think, right, I’m gonna preempt the snap here, as Washington tried to do on a number of occasions last year. It’s a game of cat and mouse after that, but I’ve always said, and I’ve said the same thing to any, and I spoke to quite a lot of television stations and reporters and journalists over the last couple of years, but, and I’ll say the same as I’ve always done, is everybody could do the QB sneak. Everybody can do it, and a lot of teams have tried it and failed, you know. But the Eagles are incredibly lucky that they’ve got certain individuals that are absolutely aligned to doing that move better than anybody else. You’ve got a quarterback who, pound for pound, will be one of the strongest quarterbacks in the league.

DG: That would be Super Bowl MVP Jalen Hurts, who, oh by the way, can squat over 600 pounds.

RG: So you’ve got that strength. You’ve then got that front in the O-line, which, you know, one of the heaviest O-lines, I think, in the league. And ironically, and this was always the strange bit for me, and I used to kind of laugh when it was called the push and the shove. There’s very little pushing and shoving involved in it, you know?

DG:(Laughs) Kind of misnomers, okay.

RG: Yeah, the two players behind Hurts they hardly ever get to Hurts. You know, the job has been done before then. So, you know, I always used to find it quite funny when they called it the shove and the push, because there’s not a lot of that actually goes on in it. It’s an incredibly well-structured play. It’s been trained more than possibly anybody else. And it’s because the personnel is world-class, and you’ve also got a world-class coach in Jeff Stoutland, who will be one of the best O-line coaches on the planet. So you bring all these things together, and you pretty much create the perfect storm, don’t you?

DG: Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist. I mean, I saw him describing this at one point. His take was that when you are planted on the ground, as the offense often is, you are using the force, like the mass of the earth is helping you. And defense is often players go airborne to try and stop this.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So the Eagles are already in motion, they are using Earth as a launch point for their movement.

DG: And he said that that is critical in understanding why this is so hard to stop. He’s once you’re forced to go up in the air against a, a large army that has already started moving forward with the force of the Earth behind them. That’s like, it’s a lost cause. Is that, does that, do you agree with that analysis?

RG: I totally agree with his analogy, literally in contact and collision. If you don’t keep your feet in the ground, then you are pushing against nothing. So when I work with linebackers, I always have them going through the tackle. Their cleats are never allowed to leave the ground. So their cleats must stay in the grass all the way through contact because it means that you are getting force coming through your body. And you are remaining in control. You must keep your feet in the ground, regardless if you’re offense or defense, it’s the only way you’re gonna remain strong. The minute you leave the ground, you’re in no man’s land, you know?

DG: With Richie’s help, the Eagles’ offensive line developed the Brotherly Shove into an unconquerable play. And when a play works that well, it attracts attention.

BROADCASTER 1: The game must not be reffed.

BROADCASTER 2: The Tush Push drama.

SPEAKER 1: I’m divided on the whole tush-push thing, but after watching this, I’m out on it.

SPEAKER 2: Wanting the Tush Push ban because teams can’t stop it is dumb.

SPEAKER 3: To me, this isn’t a Tush Push issue; this is an officiating issue.

[MUSIC]

DG: Last season in the playoffs, the Green Bay Packers lost to the Eagles in a Wildcard game. During that game, the Eagles ran the Tush Push four times. So then the Packers submitted a rule change proposal that would prohibit “pushing, pulling, lifting, or assisting the runner except by individually blocking opponents for him.” They wanted the Tush Push banned. The argument against the Tush Push is basically that it’s hard to officiate. In all the chaos of the play, it’s difficult for refs to see if a player is offside or if the quarterback actually gets stripped in the process. Others say the Tush Push actually can be dangerous for players. To go into effect, the proposal would need 75% of NFL owners to vote in its favor. It was a close call, but the new rule felt two votes short, meaning the Eagles could keep pushing. From Richie’s perspective, the whole thing felt kind of ridiculous.

RG: I just always felt that I don’t think people understood the play. It’s an incredibly technical play that’s very well coached to start with. Secondly, there’s no real data to show that it causes injury to the players that are doing it or the players against it. So there’s your second thing. And finally, you know, it wasn’t part of the game. Players couldn’t join. Well, if you think of a gang tackle, if a linebacker goes through and catches one of the offensive players, and then two and three players join them, and it’s that gang tackle, and you drive them to the ground, you’ve always gotta be careful, it’s a mirror image. So what you might be trying to ban offensively might actually happen in defense, so you might have a problem there. So obviously it wasn’t banned. I think it’s right that it wasn’t banned because I know a number of defensive coaches genuinely in the NFL wanted to stop it, you know. It’s like it’s a challenge here, you know. The challenge is to stop it, and teams have stopped it; it’s not an undefendable play.

DG: All right. I will tell you, I have been a football fan my entire life. I know what it feels like to pray and plead for your team to win. I know how badly the fans want it, but I can’t even imagine how it feels to see the play that you helped perfect, make it to the Super Bowl, and help win the game.

[MUSIC]

DG: So talking to Richie, that’s what I really wanted to know. I mean, besides whether maybe he’ll help design some kind of unbeatable play for my Pittsburgh Steelers. Anyway, what I wanted to know was what it feels like to see a team win on your play in the biggest game of the year.

RG: That gives me as much of a buzz as anything else, you know? To see that play and the way that it evolved and how difficult it was to stop and the difference it made to the Eagles, I played maybe a one or a 2% part in that, but you know, you would never take all the credit because you’d be totally wrong to do that. Sometimes I was embarrassed when I was sitting thinking, oh my word, you now, because there was a lot of things on YouTube and people making up films of this Scottish guy and whatever. It’s very nice, you know, but there’s so many other things I’m involved in too. So I used to sit in a Sunday night and I used to watch the Eagles and think, right, I wonder how many times, and then you’ll get texts coming from my mates in the US going, “Here we go, they’re gonna go for it again.” But I thoroughly enjoyed working with Jeff Stoutland, great, great coach, good man, good human being. And you know what? If you’ve made a one or a 2% difference to a play that. It’s not a new play; it’s been around for a long time, then that’s great. But I’m always thinking of the next play, and I want to be involved with maybe another player here doing something or trying to change the game slightly. It’s exactly what I do in Rugby Union as well. You know, I’ve been involved in a different way of coaching players, contact and collision, and those ways of now kind of going out around the world, and a lot of people use my equipment, and that’s the big thing for me. You know, I just want to make players as accurate and as safe as possible.

DG: Accurate and safe. As a coach, that is Richie’s bread and butter. Coming from the world of rugby, Richie said players would try to perfect their tackles in practice so they didn’t get hurt in games. But in American football, he wasn’t seeing the same thing.

So what was your initial impression when you kind of started looking under the hood of an NFL team and bringing your insights about accuracy and safety from another sport?

RG: I think that, you know, if you really are honest about it, football, NFL, there was some excellent coaching getting done of fundamentals years ago. Really good fundamental coaching being done. You know, it was the sort of, the heartbeat of the game was to be technically accurate, you know? And when you look at old footage as well, there’s a lot of accuracy in the play that you see. I think what’s happened, this is my opinion, and I’ve discussed it with a number of coaches over the years, it became so scheme-oriented, offensive scheme, defensive scheme, that more and more time was spent on the scheme and not the actual fundamentals that work within the scheme, you know? And also, the biggest problem for coaches across contact and collision sports, you’ll always hear it, we’ve not got enough time. So what happens is the time gets pushed and pushed and squeezed, and you start concentrating more on scheme than you actually do on the fundamentals. And I’ve always said, you could have the greatest defensive scheme in the planet, but if your guys can’t tackle, it’s not worth anything, you know?

DG: Fair.

RG: And that’s exactly what’s happened. And I think even in the last three to five seasons, I’ve seen more, and maybe hopefully I’ve had something to do with this Because I’ve worked with a huge amount of the coaches now and players that there’s a lot more fundamental accuracy technique work being done in and around the tackle than there’s ever been although there could still do to be more. And usually what happens is they do a lot of it at the start of the season because you’ve got time and camp and whatever, and then it just starts to drop off as the season goes on. And I’m lucky you know I’ve seen a lot of data and stats from some of the big companies, you know, that have shared that with me. And there’s a huge amount of injury at the start of the season in American football, especially through camp and in the first two or three games. And I used to say, “Well, that’s complete common sense to me because most of your defensive guys don’t tackle from January to July.” So if you’re not actually sharpening up your skill of tackling over four to six months, how can you then come back in a top-class professional environment and be at the top of your game?

DG: And just start hitting people, just like after you’ve been chilling out all the off-season. (Laughs)

RG: I used to say this to guys, it’s like a golfer about to take part in the Masters, but for eight weeks beforehand, he doesn’t do any iron play at all. What kind of golfer are you gonna get?

DG: Yeah.

RG: You know, so these guys really should be following programs that are specific to them as an individual, their position, they should be following programs throughout the off-season. Most of them are in phenomenal shape. They’re in gyms, they’re running. You see a lot of O-Line work. You see a lot of hand placement and O-Line work, and you see it on Instagram and X. The defensive side of the ball, you hardly see anything because, as one coach said to me, “Tackling’s not that sexy.” So it doesn’t look good on Instagram, and it doesn’t look good. So, you know, you sometimes wonder how good could these players be? And that’s what we’ve done in the last two or three years. I now work with players two to three weeks out from camp to get them ready to go back to hit. Simple as that, you know?

[MUSIC]

DG: Well, it’s interesting you bring that up is tackling not being sexy. I mean, I do think about this conundrum for the NFL. Like, the only really sexy tackles are the big, massive, violent hits that, you know, the eighties and nineties. We loved to watch as football fans, and those would play well on Instagram. But now we’re to, we’re at a point where the NFL is taking safety more seriously, and it’s hard to celebrate that kind of violence. So what, you know what, what is sexy about tackling without that?

RG: We should all be taking it more seriously because, actually, we thought that was great. And don’t get me wrong, we’ve all been in contact collision sports where we have done things that we thought were the right things to do. You know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, we were going live, bone on bone, every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday night for like 45, 50 minutes, full on. Guys getting lacerations, broken fingers. It was just, you know, it was a tough session, well done, great stuff. We had no idea really of concussion, brain injury, and it’s not blaming anybody. We just didn’t know about it. So the way I was coached is now night and day to how we would coach contact collision athletes, quite rightly. And the good old days of somebody getting their helmet knocked off their head and smashed on the ground, and everyone loved that, it was phenomenal, it was great. How wrong we were, really, how wrong we were because we didn’t have a clue, actually, what was going on.

DG: It is a sad reality of professional football. A lot of people get very hurt in this game. A 2023 study found that pro football players sustain an average of two injuries per season.
Coming up next, if Richie could make the players more accurate when they tackle, he thought he might make the whole game of football safer.

[MIDROLL]

DG: This is Sports in America. I’m David Greene. And let’s get right back into our conversation with Richie Gray, the rugby coach who helped create the Tush Push and who wants to make football safer for everybody.

So you, I mean, you’re obviously known for your connection to the Brotherly Shove, the Tush Push, but it sounds like you see yourself as being an important player in keeping NFL players safe, and teaching, teaching technique, teaching accuracy. Tackling that is more about the effectiveness as the tackle and not the brutal hits that can really give people concussions and injure people.

[MUSIC]

RG: I want to never come away from the contest and the competition. You know, I want big hits, I want players colliding with each other, but I want it done accurately. And I want it done in a way, and I’ve said this for many years now, I coach contact and collision, and I want my players to be the most accurate players in any team, in any competition. That’s the way it goes. I coach contact and collision currently for Toulouse down in the French Top 14 Leagues, which is pretty much one of your top leagues in the world for rugby. And I’ve always said to my players, I want to meet them in 25, 30 years time and they’re kicking a football or a rugby ball around with their son or daughter. That’s how I will decide if I’ve coached well or not, you know? And I think… I don’t want to come away from the essence of the game, which is contact and collision, but I want my players to be more accurate, 100%. There’s a fine line, and I’ve said this on many occasions, that contact collision sports, and there are many of them. You could throw yourself down a hill on a mountain bike. You could go and play ice hockey. You could do any sort of the martial arts. There’s many, many contact collision sports. They have all got an element of danger to them, and you have to decide if you want to cross the line or not; it’s as simple as that. But the governing bodies and people like myself and coaches, we must make sure that we can look at yourself in the mirror and say, “I am making this sport now as safe as possible in the context that we’re in.” But the player is still gonna have to decide if they’re gonna cross the white line or not. Because there are a hundred sports I could name that have got an element of danger to them.

DG: Why is that image of the family playing something that stays with you as sort of the barometer for whether you’re doing something right?

RG: Yeah, I just think I want, I just would like players that have gone through contact collision sport to make sure they come out the other end, and they still can enjoy then the rest of their life. Because remember, these guys have got about, well NFL is possibly shorter than Rugby Union, but we always say you’ve got about eight to 10 years as a top quality pro in that contact collision sport, and then after that, you know, you decide at kind of the age of 28, 30, if you want to continue playing. Some players go on to play way into there and good on them. Others they might have a career of three or four years. It just depends. So you just want to make sure that, you know, they love the sport, they’re accurate, they enjoy it. They maybe make themselves financially sound in what they’re doing at the very top level anyway. And then they go on and live the rest of their life.

DG: A really basic question, Richie, for parents, for people who are not big NFL or rugby fans, when they look at a contact collision sport and they just say, why? Why put yourself at risk? Why should I let my kid play a contact sport if, even if it’s a small risk, there’s a risk of serious injury? Like, how do you answer that? Why?

RG: Yeah, I get asked that a lot, because obviously the contact collision coach, and I’ve been in many, many meetings and meetings with parents and reporters, and you name it. It’s a question that comes up over and over again. And it’s a good question, because it has to be asked. The way I look at it is, and I said it pretty much already, is the sports really didn’t have a clue about 25, 30, 35 years ago. They didn’t, right? They didn’t know, they didn’t know the science, they didn’t have the data, they didn’t have the medical advice that all of a sudden over the last number of years it’s been well documented, we all have now. There’s a massive more understanding of contact collision sports than there’s ever been before. So that’s a positive. And then you’ve got all the governing bodies of the separate contact collision sports are all going literally out of their way, quite rightly, to make the sports as safe as they can be, quite happily. And you look at the things that even the NFL have brought in in the last two or three years, and it might only be 1% gains, but it’s making the sport safer every single time. An instrument, or mouth guard, or head impact or the insight analysis that you can get inside the football Riddell helmets now, all of these things are there to make the sport safer. But at the end of the day, and this is the but, you still have to cross the line to play a contact collision sport. Whether that be boxing, whether it be driving an F1 car, whether it’d be throwing yourself down a hill, or a BMX or mountain bike, I could name, you could name 100 sports as well. Those sports are always going to be there. And somebody once said to me this, and this is really important, you know what, we should ban them all. If you banned them, they would go underground 24 hours later.

DG: Because people just like them too much. I mean, they’re part of our culture and…

RG: Totally, but what would happen if you banned them all, they would start again the next day, maybe by a different governing body or group, and literally they wouldn’t care about health and safety. It would just be showing the collisions and the contact. And so all we can do as governing bodies is make the sport as safe as we possibly can. And that’s in training, that’s preparation, medical strength conditioning technique. Tactical accuracy, you name it. That’s all we can do.

DG: Richie sees his goal to make football a safer game as a family mission, one that he inherited from his dad’s coaching career.

What did you learn from your father in terms of coaching, and what you bring to that?

[MUSIC]

RG: Ah, my father was a great people person, you know, he’d be possibly one of the first coaches, and I’ve heard this a lot over my years in coaching, you coach people, you don’t coach players. I think Nick Saban said something very similar three or four years ago. I remember him saying something very similar, to like I coach people I don’t coach football players.

DG: Yeah, what does that mean at a deeper level? I know you hear that a lot, but I’m curious what you think it means.

RG: You know what, it means that you’ve got to understand the person that’s in front of you first. You know, we’re all football players, but we’re human beings first, you know? And we’ve all got different emotions, we’ve got things that will make us feel good, things that’ll make us feel bad. You don’t ever know what battles players are fighting outside of the facility, you know? There could be divorces going on, there could be deaths, there could be losing parents, you don’t have a clue, so I always think in coaching, you’ve got to understand the whole player, and you’ve also got to individualize, especially in football, you’ve gotta individualize the training for them. An outside linebacker, a pass rusher, a central linebacker, a DB, a D lineman, depending on where he is. You’ve got to set up drill and you’ve got to give them things that they totally understand. I know why I’m doing this. This is going to make me better in my small part that I play within the game. If you try and blanket coverage everybody with the same chat and the same buzzwords and the same drill, and you just, you become a robot, you know? You become a robotic player. So it takes a lot of work because you’ve gotta understand your player, you’ve got to know them. You’ve got to understand the position that they play, and what works for them. But you have so much help now, too, with analysis, and you know, we’ve got every stat that we want, now every percentage that we want.

DG: Which makes it harder to remember the fundamental connection with the players when you’ve got numbers. Was your dad like a real player’s coach?

RG: Big time, yeah, huge. And that’s what you did then. They never had all of that stats and data, and they had a VHS or a Betamax videotape that they pushed in, and they have a pen and a bit of paper, and they wrote notes on how the team played. So, you know, our world now, if you want to live it, can actually dehumanize you. You become linked to stats and data and everything else that sometimes takes you away from coaching another human being, you know? We’ve got an incredibly important job, because you must trust me. I’m asking you to do things that are contact and collision-related. You’ve got to trust what I’m saying to you, you know? And I’ve got to make sure I’m telling you the right things, it’s as simple as that.

DG: What do you want your legacy to be Richie?

RG: I want my legacy to be this guy completely revolutionized the sport of contact collision, mainly NFL, Rugby Union, Rugby League. They’re the three key sports that he had a massive part to play in changing the way we train, in changing that we coach, methodology. The way we look at certain technical skills related to contact and collision, this person, this coach, pretty much set the blueprint for us all now going forward to what we should be doing.

DG: Richie, this has been really enjoyable. I really, really appreciate it.

RG: No problem, David, it’s been a pleasure speaking to you, and especially when you’re from a village in Scotland, and you’re involved in one of the biggest team sports on the planet, it’s still quite funny to me, but all you want to do is make a difference, you know?

[THEME MUSIC]

DG: Next time on Sports in America.

[LAUGHTER]

DG: We sit down with third-generation professional wrestler, Nattie Nighthart, to talk about her new memoir, “The Last Hart Beating.” She’s part of the legendary Hart family that produced greats like Bret and Owen Hart. She is also the first woman in her family to make a career of wrestling.

NATTIE NEIDHART: He didn’t want his daughters to do it or his granddaughters to do it because he knew firsthand that it’s a tough world.

DG: We find out how Nattie made her way onto the mat, and we ask the question: if the result of a contest is predetermined, do we still call it a sport?

NN: My grandfather would roll over in his grave, and he heard me tell you that it was not real.

DG: That is coming up next week on Sports in America.

This is Sports in America.

I’m your host, David Greene. Our executive producers are Joan Isabella and Tom Grahsler.

Our senior producer is Michael Olcott. Our producer is Michaela Winberg, and our associate producer is Bibiana Correa.

Our engineer is Mike Villers. Our tile artwork was created by Bea Walling.

Sports in America is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia and is distributed by PRX.

Some of our interviews were originally created by Religion of Sports, with special thanks to Adam Schlossman. You can find Sports in America on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, the iHeart Radio app, you know, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Executive Producer: Tom Grahsler
Senior Producer: Michael Olcott
Producer: Michaela Winberg
Associate Producer: Bibiana Correa
Engineer: Mike Villers
Tile Art: Bea Walling

Sports in America is a production of WHYY, distributed by PRX, and part of the NPR podcast network.

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