Committee ponders OT changes 
March, 20, 2007
03/20/07
9:02
PM ET
Give the NFL Competition Committee a lot of credit. There isn't a lot broken on the field in the National Football League, so the committee is wise in not recommending many changes for the upcoming season. The recommendations of the committee will be voted on at the upcoming owner's meetings.
The normal 10-day meeting of the committee, which began last week, was finished in nine days, and the only significant adjustment involved overtime. For the past few years, critics have complained about the overtimes being too predicable. The team that wins the overtime coin toss tends to have a big advantage, which has caused an outcry for the league to consider a rule change in which both teams have a chance to get the ball.
Wisely, the Competition Committee stayed away from making such a change. Instead, they studied the trends and came up with two wise adjustments.
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John Clayton
John Clayton is a senior writer at ESPN.com. He brought his vast NFL knowledge -- and prodigious list of contacts -- to ESPN in 1995 after a long career covering the NFL as a newspaper reporter in Pittsburgh and Seattle. His presence across the network is ubiquitous, from ESPN.com and "SportsCenter" to ESPN Radio and ESPN The Magazine.
Clayton was inducted into the writers' wing of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2007. A 1976 graduate of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, he was inducted into the school's Hall of Fame in 2001.
