Commissioner Tagliabue: I’ll run over what we did this morning and what we expect to do coming up. I gave my overview of the league and we started off with that great video by Steve Sabol and his people at NFL Films recapping the season, including the Ravens’ Super Bowl victory. Then we talked at some length about the Internet and new media, focusing on where we are with the Internet with the team and league sites, the network that we approved at the league meeting a year ago. We finished up this morning with what we call the league economic review, a five-year projection of revenues and the salary cap and things like that.

This afternoon we’re going to have the status report from the Management Council on where we are with discussions with the Players Association about extending the Collective Bargaining Agreement beyond the end of the current television contract. We’ve been talking to Gene Upshaw and his people about an extension that might take us out as far as 2007 with the Collective Bargaining Agreement, which would be two years beyond the current television contract.

We’ll have a brief update this afternoon on where we are in terms of supporting the construction of new stadiums, with some focus on the four projects that were approved this year, which we’re in the process of figuring out how they’re financed. Those four projects are Philadelphia, Chicago, Arizona and Green Bay. And then we’ll wrap up with an NFL Films report late in the afternoon, which will focus on the new facility that’s being built and will open later this year. This new NFL Films facility will replace the old one that they have been in for many decades and this really is a state-of-the-art, twenty-first century, digital-type of facility.

Tomorrow we’ll have an in-depth discussion of realignment, including discussion of the scheduling formula which is a very powerful feature of realignment as most of you know. The new scheduling formula will guarantee 14 common opponents out of the 16 games on the schedule. That’s more equity than we’ve had in the past scheduling formula. Just as important, or maybe even more important from a fan’s standpoint, the new scheduling formula will guarantee that every team will play every other team in its conference at least once every three years on a rotating basis and every team in the other conference every four years. Some of the gaps we’ve had in our matchups over the years, such as Marino and Elway only playing each other once in more than a decade, will be remedied. You’ll really have a lot of exciting matchups on a regular basis that we haven’t had under the current scheduling formula, whether it be Packers against Raiders or Cowboys against Miami. Things like that will now be built in and guaranteed to the fans under this formula.

Tomorrow we’ll have some in-depth discussions on the Competition Committee’s report, which will focus on the issue of sportsmanship and to some extent officiating in that area, as well as instant replay. Wednesday morning we’ll have what’s become an important tradition of the league meeting, the small meeting we have with head coaches and principal club representatives and myself. We’ll talk about what’s going on in the league and the role of head coaches as leaders and as spokesmen for the 32 teams and the key role that they play in relating to the fans and representing the National Football League and its teams. That, in a nutshell, is what we’re here to accomplish. It’s a lot of work to do in two and a half days.

Q: On changing the rule regarding assistant coaches in the playoffs being interviewed for possible head coaching opportunities:

A: We had quite a bit of discussion of that. I was involved in part of it back at the Combine in Indianapolis. We started discussing that in February and the Competition Committee has discussed it quite a bit in the last 10 days of its meetings in Naples, Florida. Their basic recommendation is that we not change our policy. We did make a change a couple of years ago where a team-to-team inquiry was allowed. "Would Coach X be interested in working for us if the opportunity were there?" Thus you could get an indication of interest. The basic feeling is that the fans wait for so long to get to a Super Bowl that there’s an obligation of loyalty from the coaching staff to its existing team in a critical time of the franchise’s history. It may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the players and for many of the fans to get to a Super Bowl game. And there shouldn’t be any distractions built into the system. The other thing that emerged during the discussions was the recognition that for many of these coaches, it’s not a question of if they’re going to become a head coach, it’s a question of when. There have been examples in the past where someone may have had to wait a year or two to become a head coach, whether it be a Mike Shanahan or Mike Holmgren, but eventually they get there. In the larger context of life, waiting a year or two to get there is not the end of the world.

Q: On the possibility of changing the start times of late-season Saturday games:

A: We’ve had some discussions with the networks about the late-season Saturday games and the first two rounds of the playoff games, the Wild Card week and the Divisional Playoff week, of moving off the early start time, 12:30 pm ET and 9:30 am on the Pacific Coast, to later in the day. The early game moving to 1:30 pm, if not later, and the late game starting in the late afternoon and early evening and rolling into prime time, which we think would be better in terms of the lifestyle today, where so many people use Saturdays as a shopping day. We’d have more of our fans able to see our games if we move them later into the day.

Q: On weather affecting the scheduling of playoff games:

A: We had some issues this past year. We had to make choices about which games would be early and which games would be late. We lucked out with New York, where there were two big snowstorms two weeks apart and the one game we played was in the middle. That’s not an overriding concern, however, as football has been played in ice bowl-type conditions in Denver, Buffalo, Green Bay and Chicago. It’s just a fact of life that we’re going to have to live with.

Q: On the stadium financing program:

A: We are going to be discussing that overall program and the commitments we’ve made on those four new stadiums. We’re looking at the specifics in terms of cash disbursements in conjunction with the flow of the timeline of the stadium construction and also the total program that we put in place two years ago. The maximum amount that the clubs would have to invest in other people’s stadiums would be one million per year per club out of national television. How you structure that over the period of debt service is something that our Finance Committee and Stadium Committee discussed in a long meeting in February. We’re going to make a big presentation on that to the clubs so everyone knows not just what stadiums are being funded but what it means to each team doing the funding over the next 15-25 years.

Q: On sportsmanship and taunting:

A: Sportsmanship is a lot more than taunting. When Trace Armstrong and Nolan Harrison came to the Competition Committee meeting at the Combine, they were talking about cheap shots in the pile and guys grabbing your facemask and twisting your helmet and pushing you back down to the ground on special teams where guys are pumped for the first play of the game. They thought it was unnecessary and unsportsmanlike. Bill Walsh spoke to me this morning, and he thought he saw more pushing and shoving on the first play of the game due to excessively aggressive and unsportsmanlike special teams play. Those are the types of things that Nolan and Trace and Gene Upshaw talked about. The solution is early flags in the preseason and regular season, and flags early in the game, even on the first play, which you don’t like to see but will put an end to it. Penalize somebody 15 yards on the first play of the game and it will probably stop. If it doesn’t, then disqualification of a player or two will. That’s one aspect. The taunting is the other aspect. That’s what some of these demonstrations are, such as stomping on the opposing team’s logo. People just feel that it’s got no place in the game and it creates a misconception of what the NFL player is, what the NFL player represents. The coaches on the Competition Committee, Denny Green and Jeff Fisher, and guys like Ozzie Newsome, who is now on the committee and a Hall of Famer himself, feel that there is no reason for that in our game. The 99 percent of the guys who are playing it right get misportrayed by the 1 percent going over the line. There’s no reason to tolerate it.

The rules we have contemplated have the officials do a certain amount of things on the field in terms of flagging players, and then we’ll come in with fines if necessary. What Steve Mariucci did there was exemplary. It’s a tough decision for a coach to sit down one of his own players, but what Steve did (suspending Terrell Owens one game) was exemplary. It’s a good example of what shouldn’t be tolerated in the game.

Our policies contemplate that the officials will show some self-restraint. We can fine and the coaches can act. This is an area where everyone feels that the responsibility to manage your team is at the team level. That’s the first point of responsibility. That’s what the committee wants to emphasize. The league office and the commissioner’s office should only be a backup system. We’ll all be better off if it’s managed according to exacting standards at the team level.

Q: On the Raiders’ trial being positioned as personal between the commissioner and Al Davis:

A: The issue is between the Raiders and the other 31 teams. Everyone in the room knows what we did in 1995 to try and get the Raiders’ stadium built at Hollywood Park. It was an unprecedented commitment by the league of Super Bowls and Super Bowl tickets. All the owners know what we did. The Raiders voted for the resolution, but three to four weeks later, they put out a statement saying that Hollywood Park was a great and viable site for NFL teams, but they were going to Oakland. Now there’s a lot of revisionism and a lot of the owners regard the case as a sham or a counterfeit. Some of them regard it as a shakedown. But we’ll defend it in the ordinary course.

Q: On why Al Davis sued only 15 teams:

A: He’s suing the league, so he’s effectively suing everybody.

Q: On the possibility of Seattle changing divisions due to realignment:

A: There’s a lot of sentiment to keep the original western teams of the AFL going back to 1960 together in a western division, so that probably does indicate that Seattle would move into a new division. The key thing is the scheduling formula and what flows out of having four-team divisions. Only six of your 16 games are divisional games, so divisional games become a much less significant part of your schedule. The other 10 games become extremely attractive. If you took the case of the Seahawks, they would be playing on a guaranteed basis all the other teams in the AFC every third year and all the other teams in the NFC every fourth year. That would include teams such as the Giants, Packers and so forth… teams they haven’t seen much of the last couple of years. From a fan’s standpoint, that’s really the key thing.

Q: On changing the tie-breaker format:

A: There is something in the Competition Committee report on changing the tie-breaker formula. There are two recommendations that they put forth for discussion purposes at this meeting and for decision in the May or October meetings. They’ve got some thoughts that they’re putting in front of the membership tomorrow.

Q: On changing the number of playoff teams:

A: We’ve done a lot of analysis to see how the change in the number of division teams from five to four could affect the won-loss records of the teams qualifying for the playoffs. You really can’t do any reliable projections because we’re changing three things at once. We’re changing the number of teams in the division, the makeup of the divisions and the scheduling formula. So the past is not really a basis for projecting the future. It’s one of the reasons that we’re going to stick with the number of teams in the playoffs. Everything we’ve looked at indicates that we will not have a problem with the won-loss records of the teams going to the playoffs.

Q: On the number of owners not in attendance:

A: It’s eight or nine. Paul Allen and Bill Ford are not here, but they don’t usually come to these meetings. It’s single digits and obviously all the teams are here.

Q: On the changes to the meeting agenda:

A: We cancelled the committee meetings and told the clubs last week that we weren’t going to vote on business matters. Some of them are not here for personal reasons and some of them have been at other meetings as this is the fifth owners meeting that we’ve had in the past five months. The biggest problem we had was my being unavailable for the past two weeks and my preoccupation before that. We had two very good meetings of owner committees in February, one in Dallas and one in Atlanta, and we were hoping to bring some things out of those committees to a vote, but we didn’t have the time. So, we’ll either do that in May or at some point soon. Things like the Reebok deal, stadium financing and our Internet network.

Q: On the new scheduling formula:

A: There’s overwhelming support for this scheduling formula, which takes off from the concept of four teams in a division. The best of the division rivalries will be maintained and the upside is the common opponents and the equity that produces. You won’t have to look at all those charts saying that one team in the division played opponents with a strong aggregate won-loss record and another played opponents with a weak aggregate won-loss record. That type of thing will become history and from a coaching standpoint and a competition standpoint, that’s good.

With the competitiveness resulting from this system, with the salary cap and free agency, with the ability of teams to improve themselves quickly, there’s a recognition that we have less need today for the weighted element of the formula. We had the traditional weighting where the three’s played the three’s and the four’s played the four’s. There’s a recognition that under this system, with the ability of teams to come forward quickly and become winners, like the Rams did a few years ago and the Ravens this year, that there’s less justification as there was previously for that weighted element of the formula and much more importance on the common-opponent element of the formula.

The big thing is that we’ve had some potentially tremendous rivalries that haven’t really materialized in the past two decades because of the fact that matchups under the scheduling formula were not guaranteed. You had some outstanding teams that rarely matched up against other outstanding teams, and from a fan’s standpoint, that’s a negative. We’ve had some great players like Brett Favre, who have rarely been seen in some AFC cities. Under this new formula, that’s going to change. The great quarterbacks like Daunte Culpepper, Donovan McNabb and Peyton Manning are going to be seen all over the league across conferences every fourth year. And we won’t have the vacuums we’ve had and miss out on the team-to-team matchups and player-to-player matchups. That’s the biggest plus.

Q: On the banning of bandanas:

A: Denny Green can speak on the bandana issue the best of all since he’s had a policy with the Vikings where he does not permit his players to wear bandanas, stocking caps or other things. His feeling is that this is in the best interests of the players themselves because the overwhelming number of players are projecting a positive image while a few project a negative image and create a misperception with the public. And there’s no reason to have that misperception when we have outstanding people out there, in his case, Cris Carter and Robert Smith. There are so many good citizens throughout the league and why should their image be compromised by the way a few people might look just because they want to be individualistic?

We’ve had a lot of discussion with Denny and the other coaches. It has to do with the uniform code and Denny talked to me at the Combine about the anomaly that we have exacting standards for every element of the uniform except for what people put on their head. And that’s the one thing that misportrays our players. He doesn’t tolerate it with his team and he didn’t think that the league should tolerate it.