NFL MEETINGS : Owners Change Rules in Hope of Shortening Games to Three Hours

ORLANDO, Fla. â€”  The NFL owners, still following where Commissioner Paul Tagliabue leads, made a new effort Tuesday to shorten the overall time period of their 60-minute game.

This is one of the new commissioner’s priorities. An average NFL game last season ran 3 hours 11 minutes, which was, in his view, much too long.

“(The NFL) needs a three-hour game,� Tagliabue said. “And the action we took today will move us in that direction.�

The action:

--The clubs voted to pare NFL halftimes from 15 minutes to 12.

--And they voted to save another five or six minutes by getting the game clock going sooner in selected situations.

A football clock doesn’t run continuously. It is stopped when, for instance, the ball goes out of bounds, or when a penalty is called, or after kickoff returns.

And for years in NFL games, it hasn’t been restarted until the center snapped the ball to the quarterback for the next play.

To save time this season, the game clock will be restarted when the referee gives his familiar ready signal--instead of on the snap--on three kinds of occasions: after a player goes out of bounds, after a declined penalty and after kickoff returns.

The only exceptions, the NFL decided late Tuesday, will come in the final two minutes of the first half and the final five minutes of the second half.

In another change, the 30-second clock will become a 25-second clock this season, matching the time allowed for college teams to put the ball in play.

Tagliabue appointed a new realignment-expansion committee to go to work on one of the league’s most difficult problems.

It is a committee of the whole--consisting of the chairmen of the league’s top committees--plus Tagliabue, who said he will be the chairman of the chairmen.

“Traditionally, the NFL has expanded two cities at a time,� Tagliabue said. “I would expect that we’ll add two teams within two years or so, giving us 15 teams in each of two conferences, with five teams in each division.�

Realignment, however, will not come until at least 1994, and it hasn’t happened since 1969, when Pete Rozelle settled the infighting with a blind lottery.