Posted by ESPN.com's Pat Yasinskas.
At the absolute most, Tuesday's NFL spring meeting in Atlanta will last 10 hours. Although there won't be nearly as many team officials in attendance, this meeting might produce more results than the annual meeting in Palm Beach in early April.
Unlike the annual meeting, which often results in decisions being postponed, this meeting is guaranteed to have some big news. A decision on the site of Super Bowl XLVI in 2012 is expected to be announced at 2:30 p.m., after the owners spend most of their morning listening to final presentations and voting.
Arizona, Houston and Indianapolis are the finalists and Indianapolis may be the favorite. Indianapolis never has hosted the Super Bowl and the Colts will be opening a new stadium next season. In recent years, the league has made a habit of rewarding cities that open new stadiums (in warm climates or with domes) with Super Bowls.
But don't rule out Houston or Phoenix, although they already have hosted Super Bowls shortly after opening new stadiums. Both cities did fine jobs with the Super Bowls, but Houston could be hurt that the NFL doesn't usually like to have back-to-back games in the same state, unless it's Florida. Dallas will host XLV in 2011 at its new stadium. Tampa Bay will host the Super Bowl after this season and that will be followed by Miami.
As long as Indianapolis has a strong plan in place and convinces officials there are enough up-scale hotel rooms in the area, there could be a Super Bowl in the land of the Hoosiers and Houston and Phoenix would step back in line.
One other subtle fact Indianapolis has in its favor is the job the city has done with the NFL's scouting combine. The growth and revitalization of downtown Indianapolis has played a big role in the explosion of combine attention in the last decade. A lot of owners have been to the combine and have seen that Indianapolis can handle a big event.
With the meeting scheduled to start at 8 a.m. and wrap up no later than 6 p.m., there will be plenty of other business for the owners and things could move quickly and definitively. Unlike the annual meeting, the spring meeting doesn't have coaches in attendance and is pretty much limited to the owner and one or two key officials for each team.
That has a way of streamlining business and there's strong speculation owners will use this meeting to opt out of the final two years of the Collective Bargaining Agreement. The deadline for pulling the plug on those years is Nov. 8, 2008 and this might be the last and most effective time for getting all the owners together. If the owners opt out, 2009 will be the last capped year and 2010 would not be capped.
It would take only nine of the 32 votes to wipe out the final two years and that would be a public-relations nightmare for a league that's had years of labor peace. Look for Commissioner Roger Goodell to ask the league and the union that represents the players to try to negotiate an extension of the deal that would make it more palatable to both sides.
