Jordan Mailata had heard enough.
The Eagles’ left tackle has spent the week defending his team’s Super Bowl rematch victory over Kansas City, culminating in a profanity-laced takedown of Adam Schefter and the broadcasters trying to rewrite how Philadelphia actually won Sunday night.
“I could give a f*ck about what Adam Schefter says, to be honest,” Mailata said. “And I ain’t the one calling the plays on my team. Sorry, pardon my language. Pardon my French. I’m not calling the plays, and I don’t care what Adam Schefter says. Sorry, mate.”
Mailata was responding to Schefter’s Monday morning hot take on Get Up, where ESPN’s foremost NFL insider claimed the Chiefs didn’t lose the game on Sunday; they lost it back in March when NFL owners voted to keep the tush push legal.
“This game was lost in March. This game was lost when NFL owners refused to ban the Tush Push from happening,” Schefter declared. “Because this play is unstoppable.”
The Australian tackle also went after announcers who’ve been comparing Philadelphia’s bread-and-butter short-yardage play to rugby all week.
“Whichever announcer said it was a rugby play deserves jail time,” Mailata later added.
That’d be Fox rules analyst Dean Blandino and CBS’s Bill Cowher, both of whom have spent the week painting the tush push as some foreign import. Blandino declared during Sunday’s broadcast that he was “done with the tush push” because “it’s a hard play to officiate.” Cowher went further, telling Dan Patrick that it’s not a football play, it’s a scrum. They had that in rugby. You know what they did in rugby? They eliminated the scrum.”
Mailata knows rugby. He played it in Australia with Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs and South Sydney Rabbitohs’ youth teams before the NFL found him through their International Player Pathway Program. When American broadcasters who’ve never touched a rugby ball start lecturing about what constitutes rugby versus football, he notices.
But his real anger was about something else entirely. During his Tuesday appearance on 94 WIP, Mailata had already laid out his frustration with how the game was being covered. The issue wasn’t defending the tush push; it was defending everything else his team did to win.
“What I don’t understand is them using it as an excuse to why we won the game. I think it’s incredibly disrespectful to our defense and our special teams, who balled out,” Mailata said Tuesday. “That pisses me off because we give so much to this game and to kind of base it off a short-yardage play and say that we won the game off that, but not how our defense played.”
The turning point in Sunday’s game wasn’t the tush push. It was rookie safety Andrew Mukuba picking off Patrick Mahomes near the goal line after Travis Kelce dropped what should have been an easy touchdown. Mukuba returned the interception 41 yards, and Jalen Hurts scored via the tush push on the ensuing possession to put the Eagles up 10 points.
Philadelphia radio host John Kincade made this exact point when Schefter appeared on his show on Wednesday.
“You know when that game was lost? That game was lost when Travis Kelce dropped a pass that became an interception that gave the Eagles the ball,” Kincade said. “The game was lost when Andy Reid made the decision to go for it on fourth and one from his own 36 that gave the Eagles a field goal.”
Schefter got defensive when pressed about reducing the entire game to one play. “I’m not going to go into Get Up when I got 20 seconds, ‘Well, they did this and they did that and they did this,'” he replied.
The tush push controversy has reached a fever pitch this week. The Eagles ran it six times Sunday, converting four first downs and scoring the touchdown that essentially sealed the game. They’ve been successful on the play 96.6% of the time in fourth-and-1 scenarios since 2022, making it the most reliable short-yardage weapon in the NFL.
That success nearly led to its elimination this offseason. The Green Bay Packers proposed banning the play, with the final vote failing by just two votes in May. The proposed rule would have prohibited pushing or pulling a runner “in any direction at any time.”
Blandino has been making his case all week that the play should be banned, arguing it creates unfair competitive advantages and is nearly impossible to officiate properly. During Sunday’s game, officials struggled to determine whether Hurts had fumbled on one attempt because bodies were piled so high the ball disappeared.
Even Jason Kelce, the former Eagles center who helped perfect the play, admitted this week that Philadelphia’s linemen were probably jumping early on some attempts. “There were at least a couple from the game that were too early, and should be called false starts,” Kelce wrote on social media. But he argued that players on both sides jump early regularly, calling it “an extremely hard thing to officiate.”
And as long as people keep blaming March votes instead of Sunday execution, Mailata’s going to keep reminding them they’re missing the point.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.