Scholar of Contact

Jordan Mailata is six foot eight. He weighs 365 pounds.

The guy to his right - Landon Dickerson - is a bit smaller, six foot six, 335.

The guy next to Landon, Cam Jurgens, is the smallest, clocking in at a meager six foot three, and 305 pounds.

Cumulatively, that's 1005 pounds of weight: the equivalent of a grand piano, or, more appropriately, an adult polar bear.

Together, they make up the left side of the Philadelphia Eagles' offensive line—the foundation of the team that this week won the Super Bowl.

Their job, like every offensive line in the NFL, is to form a wall in front of the quarterback or running back, blocking the other team’s defenders.

It's the same job description as pretty much every other offensive line in the NFL - but a handful of times each game, when the team needs just a yard or two, they do something unique.

The offensive line gets into an unusually low stance, nearly parallel to the ground. Behind them is Jalen Hurts, the Eagles quarterback, usually with two other players directly behind him.

The ball is snapped. The entire offensive line explodes forward as one unit, staying low, creating not so much a wall as a wedge. Hurts tucks himself directly behind the surge, as tight to his linemen as possible.

The players behind him immediately drive forward, adding their weight and momentum to push both Hurts and the pile.

They call it the Tush Push.

The play’s chances of success are as close to a certainty as anything in the NFL. In 2022, the first season it was introduced, it succeeded over 90% of the time the Eagles deployed it. While the rest of the NFL has to fight for that final yard, the Eagles basically get it for free.

It’s a huge advantage—and one that utterly infuriates its critics. With every Eagles win, the calls to ban it grow louder—not just because of how effective it is, but because it doesn’t look like anything else in American football.

Passing, running, scrambling - that’s football. But pushing - that’s a rugby thing.

The truth is, they’re not entirely wrong.

Tackle culture

American Football operates on an omerta system when it comes to play designs, calls, and signals - the advantage of anticipation being so great, they’re shrouded in secrecy - meaning it’s difficult to attribute plays to specific people.

Former Eagles center Jason Kelce, however, accidentally broke ranks. A year or so back, he revealed that the team had brought in some outside help to fine-tune the play- namely, a man with a Scottish accent.

The man in question was Richie Gray, a resident of Galashiels and a former assistant coach for Scotland, South Africa, and Fiji. Despite his stints with multiple international teams, Gray’s expertise remains rooted in one thing: tackling.

Unlike most assistant coaches, who cover broad tactical or positional areas, he is the world’s foremost authority on the art of contact.

Gray’s entire career revolves around answering one question - how to make one person tackle another more effectively. It’s one he takes seriously.

"Does your facility, building, club, or team have a tackle culture? It’s a question I ask every time I visit a contact sports facility. When I walk into your strength and conditioning room, the locker room, the training field—does your tackle culture jump out at me? How important is it to your organisation?"

Tackling has never been an exact science. There are fundamentals—body positioning, grip, leverage—but for much of rugby’s history, technique was more of a guideline than a rule.

Watch a match from the 1970s, and you’ll see players hurling themselves into contact with little uniformity.

That was fine when the average player was smaller and slower, but today - thanks to modern nutrition and training, that’s no longer the case.

In particular, the size delta between players on a team has risen as the biggest players (the equivalent of Jordan Mailata a few decades ago would have been 250 pounds - literally two thirds his size) have become even bigger.

At the same time, rising awareness of head trauma has transformed the way contact sports handle concussions.

Where players once shook off a hit and carried on, strict head injury protocols now mean a poorly executed tackle doesn’t just hurt - it can take a key player off the field for weeks.

Hurts, for instance, missed three games in the run-up to this year’s playoffs due to a concussion.

This has led to a paradox in tackle training. Since teams can’t afford to run full-contact drills at speed without risking injuries, players get fewer reps in real collision scenarios.

That means worse tackling technique, increasing the likelihood of dangerous hits when playing at full pelt.

Put simply, the techniques that once stopped a five-foot-four miner playing on the wing for Wales now leave you bouncing off - or worse, on the ground in the fencing position with a brain injury. The modern game demands precision.

That’s where Richie Gray comes in.

The five fights

Gray does two things.

First, he helps teams refine their tackling technique using a methodology he calls the five fights, a framework designed to modernise how players engage in contact (“track, prepare, connect, accelerate, finish”).

Second, he designs and builds the tools that make them better at it - creating and licensing “technical training aids” like pads, bags, and sleds.

Each piece of equipment takes 12 to 18 months to develop and test, ensuring that teams can train for high-impact collisions without the risk of unnecessary injuries.

These aren’t generic training tools. Every piece of equipment is designed with precision, fine-tuning body positioning, grip strength, and impact absorption. They allow players to practice high-intensity contact without the wear and tear of full-speed collisions.

We often talk about the power of niching down—choosing the narrowest possible thing to be an expert in and building from there. This is what it looks like in practice.

Gray hasn’t just worked with some of the greatest international teams—he’s shaped the game itself.

In 2021, World Rugby formally adopted his tackling framework, rolling it out across the sport and enlisting him to help refine the rules governing rugby breakdowns.

It’s vertical integration at its best - develop a framework, prove its effectiveness, get it adopted at scale, then build the tools to implement it. Apple would approve.

Gray’s expertise came with an added benefit: when you become world-class at a skill so specialized, it stops being confined to one sport and starts becoming universally applicable.

American football, a sport obsessed with statistics, constantly looks beyond the NFL for competitive insights. Teams don’t just analyse their own league; they track data across other collision sports as well.

In 2015, a performance analyst for the Miami Dolphins noticed something unusual: South Africa’s national rugby team, then gearing up for the World Cup, had contact and collision statistics that dwarfed the rest of world rugby.

Eager to understand why, the Dolphins’ director of performance reached out.

When Gray’s contract with the Springboks ended, he was flown out to Miami, where he spent a year working with the Dolphins’ linebackers- the most important tacklers on any American football team.

Philly special

Five years later, the Eagles saw an opportunity.

The traditional quarterback sneak - where the QB keeps the ball and fights for a crucial yard - was already evolving (there are a handful of coaches and players who can credibly claim to be the father of the Tush Push).

But the Eagles realized that if they combined this new style of sneak with their uniquely massive offensive line, they could turn a routine short-yardage play into something unstoppable.

Eagles offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland (sample quote: “Hungry dogs run faster”) heard that Gray was being flown in, he picked up the phone.

"When you’re here, we’d like you to come in for a day with us and look at this play. I want you to come in, we’ll rip it to bits, have a look at it, and you give me your opinion on how you’d break it or make it better."

That moment - along with a brief podcast mention - sparked a wave of profiles on Gray last year, nearly all of them fixated on his connection to the Tush Push.

But in zeroing in on a single play, they missed the bigger story. Gray’s impact isn’t about a single day spent fine-tuning one tactic - it’s about reshaping the way contact itself is understood across multiple sports.

As a result of his work with the Dolphins—and with other NFL teams Gray declines to mention—his tackling framework was officially adopted by the governing bodies of American football and high school sports in 2021.

That means pretty much every college football player today has been trained using Gray’s methodology.

It also means that when the Eagles clinched the Super Bowl earlier this week, they did it with a team built on Gray’s approach to contact—something this hit from Eagles cornerback Cooper DeJean on Derrick Henry, one of the most powerful running backs in the game, shows better than words ever could.

The tackling equipment is no different. Licensed by U.S. company Riddell, Gray’s training tools are now standard across almost every NFL franchise.

His influence isn’t just limited to the Tush Push—if you’ve watched any sport where athletes collide at speed over the past few years, chances are, Gray’s fingerprints are on it.

Scholar of contact

Gray’s story is one of deep mastery turning into crossover creativity.

He didn’t just introduce rugby techniques to the NFL - he distilled the fundamental principles of contact and collision, making them transferable across sports.

He went so deep into a single niche that he transcended it, shaping not one but two of the most collision-heavy sports in the world (three, if you count rugby union and league separately).

It’s the same strategy that powers some of the most successful companies. Think of Stripe, which focused so intensely on simplifying online payments for startups that its API became the backbone of entire industries.

The same principle applies at the individual level: if you niche down hard enough, mastery becomes universal.

Gray never had a master plan to reach the NFL. He just kept perfecting a single skill in the sport in front of him—until he became so good, the world couldn’t ignore him.

Go deep enough into one thing, and eventually, the world will come knocking.

It turns out, being a scholar of contact pays.

aled@ashore.io

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