Jason Kelce Steps In to Save the Tush Push! Eagles Legend Shuts Down Retirement Rumors at NFL Owners Meeting

The Philadelphia Eagles got a big assist this week.

The National Football League's spring league/coach accelerator meetings took place on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. One of the biggest topics on the agenda was the future of the "Tush Push." This is because the topic was tabled rather than voted on and failed at the owners meetings earlier in the offseason.

There were reports early in the day Wednesday that spelled doom for Philadelphia's popular quarterback sneak, but things changed in the afternoon. The Eagles squeaked through and the "Tush Push" survived the voting by two votes. Overall, 22 teams still voted to ban the play, but the ban needed 24 votes to carry.

It has been reported left and right that Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie had a very long speech in which he defended the play, but he wasn't the only one in the room for support. The Eagles brought team legend Jason Kelce into the meetings to help sway the owners.

Kelce joined the 94WIP Sports Radio Morning Show to discuss the meeting and shared that the "main reason" for his inclusion was to dispel rumors that the "Tush Push" prematurely ended his career.

"It happened the last meet and that's why I was there," Kelce said about the idea of his retirement being caused by the play. "The Eagles felt numerous coaches and owners at the previous meetings had alluded to me stepping away from the game because of the play and what it was doing to my body...I had numerous media things where I was relenting running the play and I think that the main reason why I was there was to really dispel that stuff. A lot of that stuff gets said in jest, right...

"Like, there's a quote of me before that play that Lane Johnson said I said, 'Eff my life.' We would do that sporadically, not just around that play, it was a running joke. At practice if you had to block a man in pass-pro, that was more of a joke but it gets kind of taken out of context...For me, that's why I was there. I was there to kind of tell them listen it's a grueling play, 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. Sometimes even for six inches, but it's so impactful..."