PHILADELPHIA — At the risk of being too subtle or coming off like an unrepentant homer, anyone who thinks the NFL should ban the “Tush Push” — the Eagles’ twist on the traditional quarterback sneak — is a whining whiner who whines like a whiny little weenie.

In recent years, there have been plenty of overwrought controversies and scandals that have kept the public focused on pro football even when the games aren’t going on. (Remember former quarterback Mark Brunell nearly crying on ESPN over Tom Brady’s duplicitousness in Deflategate?) But this one might set a new standard for utter ridiculousness. Boiled down, here’s the issue: The Eagles run a play that no opponent has so far been able to stop. Other teams try to run the play, but they don’t run it nearly as well as the Eagles do. So, the argument goes, no one should run the play. It should be outlawed.

And who’s making this argument? No need to be a pyromaniac in a field of straw men here. Plenty of NFL coaches and executives are making their thoughts and feelings public. Take Atlanta Falcons coach Raheem Morris, who told reporters Tuesday at the draft combine that he would vote to do away with the Tush Push. Or take Mark Murphy, the president of the Green Bay Packers, the franchise that has petitioned the NFL to ban it. “I am not a fan of this play,” he wrote on the Packers’ website on Feb. 1. “There is no skill involved, and it is almost an automatic first down on plays of a yard or less. … The play is bad for the game.”

Murphy’s primary objection to the Tush Push is that it relies on an action — an offensive player or players pushing a teammate forward — that was once illegal in pro football but isn’t anymore. This is like saying that someone who is 21 or older in the year 2025 should be arrested for drinking a beer. Yes, the 18th Amendment used to be the law of the land, but now it isn’t. Similarly, Murphy’s schoolmarm approach to the NFL’s rules is irrelevant as long as the league doesn’t reverse itself, and it would be absurd if the league did, because there’s no logic underpinning any of this anti-TP lobbying.

No one disputes that what Jalen Hurts and the Eagles’ offensive line are doing when they scrunch together, snap the ball, and surge forward is permissible, and no one is making the case that the Tush Push is threatening to alter the nature of football now and forevermore. Murphy and those who agree with him aren’t standing athwart the first-down marker yelling, STOP! because they believe they’re preserving the sport’s purity and integrity. Their complaints are instead pretty piddling: We can’t do it like the Eagles do it. We can’t stop it when the Eagles do it. It’s not fair. And besides, someone might get hurt.

“To me, there has always been an injury risk with that play,” Buffalo Bills coach Sean McDermott told reporters Monday. “I just feel like player safety and the health and safety of our players has to be at the top of our game, which it is. It’s just that play to me or the techniques that are used with that play to me have been potentially contrary to the health and safety of the players. And so again, you have to go back though in fairness to the injury data on the play. But I just think the optics of it I’m not in love with.”

That’s a lot of marble-mouthed equivocation and speculation over a play that, according to NFL spokesman Jeff Miller, teams use so infrequently that the league has no injury-trend data related to it. This entire campaign is a solution in search of a problem, and one of the reasons it’s so infuriating is that it’s so familiar.

It would be one thing if every NFL team were relying on the Tush Push and having as much success with it as the Eagles have had, if the play were a universal shortcut that allowed any offense to dominate any defense — the football equivalent of a computer hack. But that’s not what’s happening here. The Eagles have discovered and refined an innovation that gives them an advantage over their opponents, and every time an athlete or team moves a sport forward in its strategy or thinking or possibilities, there are those who are desperate to maintain the rigidity of the status quo, mostly so they don’t have to worry about learning something new and catching up.

The Tush Push isn’t cheating, isn’t unethical, isn’t anything but a new wrinkle in an old game. It’s Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell rising above the rim. It’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar unleashing his skyhook. It’s Bruce Sutter splitting his fingers to throw his fastball. Murphy, Morris, and the other members of their crybaby chorus are all singing from the same sorry songbook: If you can’t beat ‘em, bleat at ‘em. The best thing for the NFL to do is ignore their voices.

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