Tom Curran • E-mail

The NFL owners' meetings begin this Sunday in Palm Beach, Fla. Amid the evening clinking of cocktail glasses and the daytime curtsies of the staff at the posh Breakers Hotel, some fascinating bits of business are going to be addressed.

Here are a few of them.

Playoff seeding
As it stands now, the four division winners automatically get the top four seeds in their conference come playoff time. This means you get 11-5 Wild Card teams that finish in second place in their division (Jacksonville last season) playing on the road against 10-6 division winners (Pittsburgh last season). The new proposal would still give a bye to the top division winners with the best records – same as it is now – but seeds three through six would be determined by best record. In the event of a tie – a division winner and a Wild Card at 9-7, for example, the division winner would get the higher seed.

A by-product of this would be that teams that have wrapped up their divisions would not automatically host first-round playoff games. It's an on-board "no-tanking system" that helps ensure the fiasco last year when the Browns needed a Colts win over Tennessee to get into the playoffs and Indy basically gave up at the end of the game.

"We don't want to be in the business of trying to dictate what coaches have to do late in the season with respect to the decisions they are going to make," said NFL Competition Committee member Rich McKay from the Falcons.

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"They've earned the right to make those decisions.  They may have injuries that they've decided to rest, and other times they decide not to.  As we saw this year, coaches made those choices.  (But) playoff seeding can motivate coaches late in the year based on seed and potential home game or (away) game to have more games that count late in the year.  So for us, we think that's a better solution than ever getting in the business of trying to legislate who a coach will play."

Legalize tampering
A little bit. As I (and plenty of others) have mentioned before, if the NFL is serious about addressing tampering, it needs to do something about what goes on at the Combine. With GMs and agents intermingling and hundreds of players about to become free agents, the temptation – and practicality – of discussing those players at the Combine is too great.

So the NFL is going to consider a five-to-seven day period before the start of free agency in which teams and agents can talk about prospective free agents.

The league wants to call it a "dead period" which is an oxymoron since it promises to be quite live.

Teams could not meet, talk to or officially sign prospective free agents but they could negotiate through a "certified agent."

"There's too much contact that's coming from all different directions, a lot of it coming from the agent's direction," said McKay.  "If you create this dead period, you're creating a much more level playing field for those that wait the entire period.  We don't think there will be a lot leading up to it because every team will have that right and no contract should be executed during the dead period.  There's nobody that's gaining any advantage by any early contact, and, yes, we would ask that any early contact, if this rule were to pass, would be vigorously enforced and prohibited."

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