How Many Wins Was the “Tush Push” Worth in 2023?

Photo Credit: Eric Hartline, USA TODAY Sports

At the start of the season, I discussed how the “tush push” had enabled the Eagles to go for 4th and short situations 2.4x as frequently as the average NFL team. In this post, I’ll analyze how each team performed in short yardage situations and approximate how many wins the tush push was worth to the Eagles in 2023.

My dataset consists of all 2023 rushing plays (through week 17) with fewer than 2 yards to go for a first down or touchdown. For the Eagles, I used an additional filter - runs by Jalen Hurts - to identify tush pushes.

Table 1 below shows the Cumulative Win Probability Added (wpa) for these short runs for each team, and the Wpa Premium. The latter is calculated as a team’s cumulative wpa minus the league average 0.17 cumulative wpa on short yardage run plays.

Table 1: Cumulative Win Probability Added (WPA) for each team on short yardage run plays. Eagles plays are additionally filtered for runs by Jalen Hurts to identify tush pushes

As evident from the table above, the Eagles tush push plays have more wpa (0.75 wins) in 2023 than any entire team’s short yardage run plays.

Since the tush push not only converts short yardage scenarios at a near perfect rate, but also opens up the playbook to run plays in medium yard situations, we can approximate that the tush push has been worth a total of one win to the Eagles in 2023.