Saints were warned about bounties before playoff game with Lions

PALM BEACH, Fla. — The final warning to the New Orleans Saints about bounties came in January, just before their first-round playoff game against the Detroit Lions.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell detailed the situation Monday at the conclusion of the first day of the annual meetings at the Breakers hotel. He slammed the Saints with heavy penalties last week, including a one-year suspension of Coach Sean Payton and an indefinite suspension of former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, who was rewarding New Orleans players with $1,000 if an opponent was carted off the field, and $1,500 for delivering a knockout blow.

Goodell said he sent the league’s top lawyer, Jeff Pash, and the league’s security director, Jeff Miller, to New Orleans to meet with Saints owner Tom Benson the day before the Saturday playoff game.

“The point was to make it clear to him that we had new and credible information that a bounty program may exist, and that he should make it extremely clear, beginning with the game the next day, that there should be no bounty system in place while our investigation continues,” Goodell said. “We do not want to put our players at risk, and that was the message.

“Our point was, if there is one, you’d better make sure it’s not in effect.”

Benson addressed his fellow owners Monday and was “very open,” said Goodell, who added Benson “expressed his disappointment with the club, and it’s not what he’s all about. He expects to take whatever steps are necessary to make sure it never happens again.”

Payton can appeal the suspension and probably would be able to continue working in the interim, the commissioner said, although the appeal and decision would be expedited. The deadline for an appeal is April 2. The suspension begins April 1.

There are multiple reports that the Saints are considering former NFL coach Bill Parcells as a one-year replacement for Payton. However, Goodell said that the team would have to comply with the “Rooney Rule” if it goes outside the organization to fill the job, meaning at least one minority candidate must be interviewed for the vacancy.

The second phase of the punishment process is levying penalties against the players involved, among them team captain and linebacker Jonathan Vilma, who offered $10,000 to anyone who was able to knock Minnesota quarterback Brett Favre out of the 2009 season’s NFC championship game. Favre took a beating but finished the game.

Goodell said he’s waiting for the NFL Players Assn. to finish investigating the situation and make its recommendations about punishments. The league said there were 22 to 27 players involved in the bounty program.

Thinking blue

The NFL is watching the sale of the Dodgers closely for a couple of reasons: One, if Rams owner Stan Kroenke has the winning bid, that will raise cross-ownership issues; and two, the league still considers Chavez Ravine a prime site for an NFL stadium.

Goodell said that if Kroenke’s bid proves to be the winner, “then we would immediately move with our committees to have our discussion with our membership. We’d move as quickly as possible, knowing that it’s an important issue for baseball.”

The league doesn’t want its owners competing with each other for sports dollars in the same city. Therefore, an NFL owner can also own, say, an NBA franchise in the same city, but not in another NFL city — or, in the case of L.A., a potential NFL city. Kroenke would need an owner-approved waiver from the league to own the St. Louis Rams and the Dodgers.

As for Chavez Ravine, Goodell said: “We’ve often said that that’s an extraordinary stadium site up at Dodger Stadium, and it’s something that we were interested in going back into the ‘90s.”

In fact, when former Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley was pushing for an NFL stadium there in the late 1990s, his plan was to hire Goodell as the team’s general manager. O’Malley abandoned the stadium plan when informed by city officials that they were supporting an NFL bid by the Coliseum.

Unlikely partners

The Dallas Cowboys and Washington Redskins have challenged the league’s agreement with the players’ union to set the salary cap for 2012 and to reallocate some of the salary-cap room of Dallas and Washington to 28 other clubs.

The penalty to those two teams would be to address competitive issues arising from the way those two teams handled their contracts during 2010, the uncapped season. The league wants to charge the teams $46 million in cap space over the next two seasons — $18 million per year for Washington, $5 million per year for Dallas. The Saints and Oakland Raiders wouldn’t be part of the redistribution because, according to the league, they “engaged in similar contract practices in 2010 at a far different level.”

The situation will be arbitrated by University of Pennsylvania law professor Stephen Burbank.

Overtime, all the time?

Should the NFL expand its modified playoff overtime rules to include the regular season?

That’s among the proposals that will be put to owners by the competition committee at this week’s meetings.

Unlike in the regular season, the playoff rules preclude a team from winning with a field goal on the opening possession of overtime. Unless a team opens with a touchdown, both teams get a chance to touch the ball.

Rich McKay, chairman of the committee, said there were a couple of reasons why the league adopted the rules only for the postseason when it made its overtime changes two years ago. First, that’s the only way some teams were comfortable making the change — and any such change requires a three-quarters majority of 32 votes. And second, the win-or-go-home finality of the playoffs prompted the league to make every effort to ensure both teams get a fair chance to touch the ball in overtime.

“The argument we made is it’s just inherently more fair,” McKay said. “We just felt that with the way the statistics were going, the coin flip was having too much of an impact on winners.”

Another proposal being considered entails requiring that every turnover be reviewed by a replay official in the booth. The league tried that with every scoring play last season, and found that adding those reviews added only one second to the average game time.

As for the suggestion by John Madden that referees be responsible only for watching the quarterbacks (as opposed to checking for holding too), McKay said the league has studied that and is happy about the way the rules and the officials protect passers.

McKay said the league polled its teams and determined that a majority of them see the quarterback rules as adequate, a few consider quarterbacks overprotected, but none think more rules need to be put in place to protect them.

Back to work

Peyton Manning, the Denver Broncos’ new quarterback, spent Monday morning throwing at Valor Christian High in Highlands Ranch, Colo., south of Denver. The Denver Post reported the story, snapping pictures of the four-time most valuable player as he threw.

Under the NFL’s new collective bargaining agreement, there are restrictions about when players can train at team facilities during the off-season. Valor Christian is where members of the Broncos held players-only workouts during last year’s labor lockout. When he signed with the Broncos last week, Manning was asked at his introductory news conference if he expected to participate in mini-camps this spring.

“I certainly hope so,” he said. “It’s hard to really give a timetable or a prediction. That’s one thing that I’d rather not do. I want to be out there every single snap, every single play at the mini-camps and the OTAs [organized team activities]. With the new rules this year, they’re limited. They’re probably more important than they have been in the past just because you don’t get that many of them.”

Manning underwent four medical procedures on his neck to get him to this point.

“It’s very hard,” he said last week. “I never complain, though. I have nothing to complain about. I had 20 years of a pretty unbelievable streak of health going back to high school. There are a lot of players that have missed a significant amount of time. This is the first time it’s happened to me, so I decided to learn from it.”

Backup plan

The New York Jets’ Rex Ryan wasn’t there at team headquarters for Tim Tebow‘s news conference Monday. Instead, the coach was at the NFL meetings with team owner Woody Johnson and General Manager Mike Tannenbaum.

In speaking to reporters, Ryan repeatedly referred to Tebow as a “football player,” as opposed to specifically a quarterback, and said he envisions the Heisman Trophy winner as more than a gadget in the wildcat offense — and certainly more than a typical second-string player.

“I don’t see Tim just holding a clipboard,” Ryan said. “He’s going to be playing for us. There is no doubt.”

Added the coach: “There won’t be a better wildcat quarterback in the game. Is that his only role? I don’t believe that. We’ll see.”

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