Commissioner, as you come down the stretch here, your thoughts about what is a very exciting NFL season.

I’m like most fans and it’s been a season of great games. Think about those Jets’ comebacks early in the season and some of the other great games. There have been some surprise teams too. Who would’ve thought that the New Orleans Saints would be battling the St. Louis Rams for the NFC West? And there have been some breakout players such as Donovan McNabb, Daunte Culpepper and Mike Anderson. We had Olandis Gary last year and Terrell Davis before that, and now we have Mike Anderson. I saw John Elway yesterday and asked him if the Broncos had a fourth, fifth or sixth running back coming up? He said that you never know with Mike Shanahan.

You know it’s interesting, you have to like that you have some exciting young stars, like you said, and some good stories like a rebuilding job in New Orleans. That’s very good for the League.

The Miami Dolphins are also a surprise team. Who would’ve expected Miami to be where they are without Dan Marino? And in Oakland, Jon Gruden is showing that he can get the silver and black back to where they want to be. Overall, it’s just been an outstanding season.

A couple of big picture stories. Number one is the continuing story of realignment. I know it’s always tough to convince an owner to move or to add someone else that he thinks loses in rivalry. Where are you in realignment?

There are two things on realignment. As you all know, we’ll be moving to eight divisions with four teams in each. The first thing you have to recognize there is that now, out of the 16 games, each team only has six divisional games. Thus, the other 10 games on your schedule will become more important. The second thing is that the scheduling formula we’ll be using will, for the first time, guarantee a rotation so that you’ll play every team in your conference every third year and every team in the other conference every fourth year. We’ve never had that before. So the schedule is really going to be changed with the smaller number of division games and the rotation of the non-division games. It’s going to be really exciting. Fans, including Jets and Giants fans, will be able to see on a regular basis teams that they've only seen once in a decade or even fewer than that.

That is true, sir, that will create more of a rotation, and I guess some of the rivalries that are lost or kind of misplaced, if not lost, is all just part of doing business.

The balancing here is that whatever rivalries you lose, and hopefully they’ll be a small number of those, you’ll pick up and create new rivalries. Look at what happened with Jacksonville and Tennessee. Those are two teams that have formed a terrific rivalry in a short period of time. And about the rotation system, take as an example that the Jets will play the Cowboys every fourth year and the Giants will face the Raiders every fourth year. And the Jets will play the Raiders every third year. We’re going to get some terrific matchups out of this realignment and scheduling formula.

And a lot of the division titles, too, to be won, and it makes it fun for a lot of the fans. The other thing is, starting this year there was a big question about where you were with player behavior. I know you had a lot of stuff you wanted to do with leadership, players, and different things, and I would say it’s been a very quiet year, so I’d say it has been a productive year in that department.

I give most of the credit there to the players themselves and the coaches. We had meetings during the offseason with Michael Strahan, Tony Gonzalez, Robert Smith and Cris Carter, among others. These players have taken the leadership role and they recognize that there’s no excuse for any one of their teammates to be off the beaten path and in trouble. We’ve had a good season and a minimum number of problems.

Now there’s been a lot of buzz about salary cap offenders. I know in the NBA they came down very hard on the Timberwolves. You had some things you had to do but didn’t come down on anybody to really a punishing extent.

It wasn’t the same type of offense as David Stern had with the Timberwolves. We had some complicated transactions and the biggest name player that was involved was Steve Young. They announced publicly that they were restructuring his contract and even held a press conference, so it wasn’t under the table or a secret type of restructuring. There were some documents that suggested that there were some issues that created some problems under the cap. On balance, we had a very different situation. We came down hard with $600,000 in fines and sent a real message to the entire league in terms of what the players association can do in the future. Teams may have to forfeit up to two first round picks, pay a fine of up to $3.5 million or be suspended for future cap violations. It was a very strong message to everybody.

When you look at the races down the stretch, one thing I’ve thought about is, I know it’s so hard to make a trade in the NFL, very difficult to do. Teams don’t do a whole lot of it - it’s billed so much through free agency and through the draft. But if you backed up from October to early December, the trade deadline, and were to give a team that is in the race and has a chance to maybe pick up a player due to an injury, like in New Orleans, or maybe give a team that’s out of it that has some good veteran players a chance to unload a player, do you think it makes any sense to extend that trading deadline to a point where you can help a team in a race down the stretch of the season?

When you have trades late in the season, you can have some real competitive unfairness and actually have some teams poaching on others and agreeing to trades that are designed not so much to strengthen one team but to handicap another team. You get to a certain point in the season where you have to play with the players on the roster subject only to injuries. There is too much of an opportunity for playing games in the wrong way and in a way that fans will ultimately come to resent.

Do you like the game where it is on the field as far as the officiating right now? Is it everything you thought it would be?

Instant replay has been a big plus, and that’s something that we didn’t have three or four years ago. It was a problem because you didn’t get a chance to look at a play for a second time. In the past two weeks, we’ve seen some big plays. In the Washington game with the Giants, there was the reversal that ended up with Eddie Murray missing the potential game-winning field goal. Replay was a real factor in a positive way in that game. We’ve balanced it so that it doesn’t interrupt the flow of the game too much, it’s limited, we have it in the final two minutes, and it’s working quite well.

There’s a lot of talk around the NFL, and I know this is a burgeoning part of the sport and every big sport, about the idea of rights, the signing rights, selling rights. Not only with the stadiums, but now I’ve heard talk of maybe a uniform company putting their logo on all NFL uniforms. Is this the new wave? Is this something you can see the NFL doing a lot more of, as a League rather than as teams?

What we’re really looking at there is trying to get apparel that will get our fans excited. We’ve been in a rut and we took some of our apparel for granted in terms of jerseys and outerwear. What we’re trying to do is put an emphasis on quality and introduce exciting designs that will get young people excited about their teams. And we want to give the fans an opportunity to connect in a new and fresh way with their teams and their stars. It’s more about that than about whose logo goes on what and what logo gets exposure on television.

Commissioner, you’ve had unparalleled growth as a sport since, say 1960, a lot of it in a great marriage hand-in-hand with the networks. Networks are finally seeing their market drop each year, enormous competition, different ways to watch games, different ways to view games, direct TV, a million different things. Does that change the way you view your business in the future? Because you’ve been so tied into, more than any other sport, network TV, is that something that you think will change your game in any way in the next ten years or so?

You’ll have a different mix of the media in the future. Obviously, you’ll have the Internet and more satellite TV, and you might have broader options on satellite TV. We at the NFL are committed to not just television but free over-the-air television. We have every game on broadcast television, including the ESPN game on Sunday night, which we require them to show on broadcast TV in the markets of the two participating teams. We will keep that emphasis while we add some more diversity, including on the Internet, where people can dial up what they want to watch, rather than what we are showing or what a network is showing at a particular time. That will be your big change in the next couple of years.

As a business property, is the NFL still growing at a rapid pace in your mind?

Even on television, you now have over 100 channels. At one point in time we had a three network television universe. We’re a long way from that now and our programming is stronger than ever relative to other programs on television. It’s not even close, and along with the Olympics, we’re still very special to a tremendous number of fans, especially as we move into the playoffs and the end of our season, which is what we’re heading into this weekend.

Any chance for any big change as far as television? I know people talk about the Monday Night schedule and maybe giving them options, but having talked to teams, coaches and general managers, they say that’s not possible. They need to know way in advance to schedule jets, planes, travel, etc.; they really couldn’t know a week in advance if they’re going to play a Monday Night game. It doesn’t work logistically.

The flexible scheduling could work and we discussed it very carefully with the teams last spring. The teams would have three or four weeks notice and, whether you have a Sunday afternoon or Monday night game, it’s not going to make much of a difference to the coaching staffs and players if they have the three or four week notice. We did a survey of all the general managers and club presidents and they told us that the travel would be manageable. The one difficult issue would be for the team playing on Monday night since you don’t want them to be on the road the following Sunday. So there are some scheduling issues that we’ll have to address. It’s a workable thing and I know that we’re going to keep talking about it. What’s best for the fans is ultimately going to be the basis of our decision.

You had a very good Monday Night schedule this year and you’ve had a lot of close games.

It’s been a great Monday night schedule with another good one coming up this Monday with St. Louis at Tampa Bay. I’m at a big game this Saturday in Pittsburgh since it’s the last game at Three Rivers Stadium. I’ll be out there to see the Steelers and the Redskins. I saw Lynn Swann last night and he’ll be there. It’ll be a phenomenal Saturday.

One last thing, in this rush to get new stadiums, because football offers so few dates, does it leave you and cities far behind now that baseball seems to want their own stadiums in each one of these cities?