The Philadelphia Eagles played their first game without future Hall of Fame center Jason Kelce last Friday – a 34-29 win over the Green Bay Packers in São Paulo, Brazil – but he couldn’t stay away.

As Philadelphia reached the Packers’ 1-yard line with a two-point lead with 1:12 left, Kelce fired off a tweet.

“Put an end to this!!!!!” he wrote on X.

Kelce, who now works as an ESPN analyst on “Monday Night Countdown,” was right in his decision. But the play didn’t go as usual for the Eagles. The rally between new center Cam Jurgens and quarterback Jalen Hurts was not clean. The ball fell to the ground and an alert Saquon Barkley took advantage of the fumble to avoid a near turnover.

Kelce’s next post was Homer Simpson, who backed into the bushes and out of sight.

The Brotherly Shove had only modest success in Week 1. There were four attempts in total. Two failed, one was successfully converted, and the other resulted in an encroaching penalty against Green Bay, which led to a first down for the Eagles.

So it’s 50-50, which is below the high standards the team has set for this play. The Eagles have an 86% success rate (61 of 71) since they started doing it in 2022 – well above the league average of 76%.

“It’s unstoppable,” said quarterback Will Grier. “I’ve watched them do it for two years now.”

Well, that was it.

The success rate has dropped somewhat recently. The Eagles managed a first down on 93% of their tush push attempts in 2022 (25 of 27). In 2023, they used the play more often, achieving a rate of 83% (35 of 42).

It seems the defense is getting better at slowing the game down. And now one of the greatest centers of all time is no longer in the thick of things for Philly.

One week is a very small sample size, but the results pique curiosity about one of the NFL’s most talked about and debated plays: What’s the secret ingredient behind the tush push? And was Kelce the key ingredient all along?

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The butt kick is a straightforward play on the surface. It’s a glorified QB sneak, the only difference being that there are players behind the quarterback – usually a running back and a tight end – who provide additional momentum by forcing the quarterback forward into the huddle and, ideally, through it.

The Eagles have one of the deepest offensive lines in football, with 6’6″ 315-pound tackles Lane Johnson and 6’0″ 365-pound Jordan Mailata and 6’6″ 315-pound left guard Landon Dickerson in the trenches. Add to that Hurts, a former powerlifter who can lift over 500 pounds, and current running back Saquon Barkley, who can lift around 600 pounds, and you have the makings of a powerful short-yardage operation.

“It definitely helps how strong Jalen is and how strong me and (tight end) Dallas (Goedert) are. It’s a great play,” Barkley said. “That play will be talked about for a very long time and it’s a tough play to stop, so we plan to continue to make it a tough play to stop.”

But there’s more to the scientific equation than just power, and that’s where Kelce comes in.

“Kelce has done such a good job of staying deep consistently,” Johnson said. “I think that’s why we’ve been so successful – him and then our two guards and tackles sneak in and make sure there’s nothing to lose. He used his leverage well and really knew how to execute. We’re going to try to keep the same standard as far as executing, but as you know, every (Eagles) team looks different, the players look different, so we’ll just have to wait and see.”

The other key element, players say, is will. Jumping headfirst into a wall of people and being the bottom man in a pile of 300-plus pound athletes is not for the faint of heart. The same iron spirit that helped Kelce set the franchise record for consecutive starts (156) allowed him to consistently serve as the game’s lead blocker.

“Courage, man. Every time we did it, he would always say, ‘Man, we gotta run it? OK.’ But when he ran it, he went full throttle, 100%,” Mailata said. “We were going to get it done on the first try.”

According to ESPN Analytics/NFL Next Gen Stats, Kelce had a 91% run-block win rate on push QB sneak plays last season, 16 percentage points higher than his overall run-block win rate in 2023 (75%).

The Eagles’ overwhelming success in executing the tush push put the play in the spotlight and sparked debate about whether it belongs in the NFL.

Former Washington Commanders defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio said he would “love to get it out of the way” before the Commanders and Eagles faced off last season, calling it a “beautiful game of rugby” but “not what we’re looking for in football.”

According to Rich McKay, president of the Atlanta Falcons and chairman of the committee, the NFL Competition Committee was “split” last season on whether to ban the play. The NFL ultimately decided in March that the play would remain legal in 2024.

“The league still likes the play, which is shocking to some people,” referee Brad Allen said before the season started. “But the one thing (the NFL) will tell us is that with this formation, when the running backs are so close together, they want to make sure there’s some space between them and the line of scrimmage. You can’t put them right in the gaps because that creates an illegal formation. That’s all. Other than that, they’re happy with the play, they’re in a good position with it.”

Aside from size, strength and influence, repetition has also served the Eagles well. Their 71 tush-push attempts since 2022 are 41 more than the next best team (Bills, 30).

“Kelce is clearly a special player and Jalen is a strong guy, that certainly doesn’t hurt, but compared to other teams I’ve played on, they just know: It’s fourth-and-one, third-and-one, they just give it their all,” Grier said.

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THE LESS-THAN-Friday’s outstanding start should be viewed with caution, Kelce believes.

“I don’t know if I’m the determining factor in success,” Kelce said on his “New Heights” podcast, noting that the play was stopped during the team’s playoff loss to the Tampa Bay Bucs in January. “First of all, it’s a really difficult play the first time a lot of guys run it. Once you’ve run it a couple of times, you know how to run the quarterback sneak, you get in a rhythm and you understand how it’s going to happen.”

“And I think they had a new addition in center with Cam … and then of course Mekhi Becton was new at right guard.”

The same goes for offensive coordinator Kellen Moore: “Given the circumstances of this game, I think we have some great opportunities with the QB sneak element and we’ll keep it as part of our package.”

“This is a very important game for us. … It’s a first-class game and we feel really comfortable with it.”

Jurgens, a second-round pick out of Nebraska in 2022, was a favorite of Kelce’s in this draft and was trained as his successor. Having spent two years in the film room with Kelce and working alongside him at right guard last season, Jurgens feels prepared.

“That’s the top of the wedge right there, so obviously make sure you have the right cadence to get going on the snap, and that all starts with the center and the quarterback,” Jurgens said.

The pitch at the Arena Corinthians in Sao Paulo was slippery, causing problems for players on both sides. Moore said that “there was a certain element of slippage there” when he attempted a goal-line shot late in the game, which resulted in a fumble. Under different conditions, the success rate might have been just as high.

“You can only recreate that snap and the feeling of it live,” Kelce said. “And the reality is that you lean so far forward to get an advantage that it’s a very difficult snap to get to the quarterback if you do it right. I have to think there were factors that led to that fumble, especially with the slick field.”

“I think the reality is, the more reps these guys do, the more likely they are to get back to that 90 percent-plus success rate. That hasn’t discouraged me.”