Commissioner Tagliabue: We had a real productive two and a half days. Dennis Green and Rich McKay have gone over all of the football stuff with you. I think with replay in place for three years Tex Schramm can sleep well tonight as the godfather of replay. I think everyone in the game feels very positive about where the game is and where the officiating is and where the rules are. It was a very constructive morning.

Q: Did you get to discuss the stadium-financing program?

A: Yes. We had a presentation Monday afternoon. We went over where we are with the projects that have been funded. We went over where we are with the projects that are coming up for funding and where we are in terms of the total program, including the use of television money. The big issue there is over how many years do we pay back these loans and I’m sure we will address that at our May meeting. I think we’ve got a considerable amount of flexibility. If you stretch out the payment, we will be able to keep everyone under a million per club in TV money, and clubs should be amenable to that.

Q: Is there any concern about expansion in the realignment plan?

A: I think most people are assuming that there is not going to be expansion for awhile. We had a discussion yesterday about whether the realignment plan should be for a fixed number of years or should it be permanent. I think the sentiment was to make it a permanent plan, but everyone recognizes that if there were reasons to reopen it that were dramatic you could reopen it.

: On Saints preseason game issue:

A: I spoke to Tom Benson this morning and told him that what we did was consistent with our normal practice. We had problems in week 3 and week 4 of the preseason where several teams didn’t have games. When that came to the commissioner’s office on a number of occasions in the past, we have had to redo other people’s schedules to create games for teams lacking games. It’s been a little more complicated with the bye weeks in the preseason now with 31 teams. I spoke to Tom this morning and he understood. We issued the preseason schedule today and it includes the Saints-Minnesota game in San Antonio. ESPN is going to carry that game. He was satisfied; he understood. He wasn’t pleased to lose one of his home games, but he certainly understood.

Q: What were some of the challenges for the league you discussed in your opening remarks?

A: The first thing is the economy generally. We talked a little bit about that on Monday, especially relating to television advertising. Obviously we get paid a lot by the networks and as the economy cools they could be falling short of their projections in terms of their own revenue. So long term that can have an impact.

The other one is the Collective Bargaining Agreement. We are having discussions with the Players Association about making it better, about some performance-based pay in there. A lot of that concern focuses on veteran players playing at the minimum salary. Older players sometimes perform well. Terry Allen has been part of our discussion. He had a great year in New England… while other players did too with the Giants this year. Lomas Brown and others had outstanding years. We are trying to come up with some way of creating a pool within the salary cap that would give those players additional income based upon their performance. Certainly the operation of the Collective Bargaining Agreement is a concern for some clubs in terms of costs and allocation of salary among players. The number of players that had to be released this year reflects the fact that some clubs are not monitoring the cap on a multi-year basis. You know the cap is going to grow 10 percent and contracts are growing 40 percent on an average. It’s just completely unrealistic. Then you end up creating an issue with a player because he is cut, and if you had done the contract realistically in the beginning you would have avoided two problems. You wouldn’t have had to cut him and you wouldn’t have had a disgruntled player. Those are among the things we talked about on Monday as challenges. New stadiums in a few cities are another challenge.

Q: Are you trying to get clubs to stop giving those contracts?

A: We certainly have given them some illustrations. We projected out to 2005 where we see the salary cap going. Our revenue has grown very dramatically, as did the players’ contracts. It’s a little like George Allen and Ed Williams. We gave them an unlimited budget and they spent beyond it. We have a rapidly growing cap with a lot of revenue coming into the system and some clubs seem to think that if players don’t get a 40 percent increase they can’t cut a deal.

Q: Is there a general consensus that the salary cap system is good for the game?

A: There is a consensus that it’s a good system, that it strikes a balance. No one thinks it’s perfect; we don’t think it’s perfect; the players don’t think it’s perfect; and the Players Association doesn’t think it’s perfect. I think there is a consensus across the table that it’s working well from a competitive standpoint, in terms of the competition around the league. Some of this fine-tuning is also very important.

Q: Have you had meetings with agents about this?

A: The Players Association has had meetings with agents. I think they met with them at the Super Bowl; they met with them at the Combine; and I think they had some of them at their most recent meetings in Hawaii. There is a constant communication there and we know they have been taking up some of these issues. A little sense of realism is important. I read some story in the last couple of days about Levon Kirkland. The Steelers think that he’s been a great player for the franchise and he’s a great leader, but the way the contracts were going up they had to face a tough choice. It leaves them in a position they don’t want to be in – losing an outstanding leader on the team. It leaves him in a tough situation. I think he was quoted as saying it would have been smarter to do a more realistic deal. With the benefit of hindsight that was kind of the sentiment coming through on both sides.

Q: You were right about the XFL being a minor nuisance to the league. What do you think went wrong?

A: I think it starts with the cyclical nature of sports. Pete Rozelle always used to say that sports were seasonal. They clearly are. No matter how great a game is, we have a lot of great games in America. Certainly as a former basketball player I have to say that. College basketball is a great game. It’s a cyclical thing. People want diversity in their lives. They want change. They want different kinds of excitement. Year-round football is the first problem area. As great as the game is, as many fans as there are, "March Madness" starts to attract people. Warm weather has baseball bats and gloves coming out. I think it’s the rhythm of the season and the cycle. The second thing is a little confusion as to what they were trying to do. It was not a big issue for us then; it still isn’t. I guess they will have to do their own post-mortems.

Q: On future of Saints franchise:

A: Most of the conversations I have had with Tom Benson have focused on his area and his fan base. It’s one of the smallest. It’s one that has been declining in terms of population, I think, both in absolute terms and relative to other cities. He has talked quite a bit about the growth east of New Orleans into Mississippi, along the inter-state highway down there, and the fact that they have to be more successful in doing what the Bills have done, in doing what the Chiefs have done, which is extending the marketing area for the team and extending the season-ticket radius out to those areas to the east of New Orleans. To me that is the biggest priority. To him and Jim Haslett, the biggest priority is to keep winning and to get some of the players back who were hurt last year. To me, the first issue is not so much a stadium issue, as it’s a market issue and extending the fan-base and generating the kind of support that you would like to see as they have done in Buffalo, Kansas City and Jacksonville.

Q: On future salary cap projections:

A: I don’t remember the exact numbers. I think the television numbers go up by about 20 million a club over the next four or five years. The cap would be some similar percentage.

Q: Will the league exercise its option to re-open the television contracts after 2002?

A: We haven’t made a final decision on that. I have always looked at the contracts as 8-year contracts. One of the reasons we wanted the re-opener was all the talk about revolutionary new media. I have always felt it was a little bit premature to talk about a revolution in terms of delivery of television. I think this slow-down in the tech economy is confirming that. The likelihood is that we will have these contracts out through 2005. That is the assumption, as I mentioned the other day, of our discussions with the Players Association about extending the Collective Bargaining Agreement. But we haven’t made a final decision on that.

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