I admire people who address problems before they become really big problems. Last week, at the NFL meetings in Florida, I met with director of officiating Mike Pereira to talk about the clarified illegal-contact rules, including the strict interpretation of holding and grabbing uniform shirts in the passing game, which the league will make a major point of emphasis in 2004.

At the end of our 30 minutes together, I asked Pereira a question about my officiating pet peeve -- the major disparity between penalties called by different crews. As I wrote last fall , it's unacceptable that two crews could each officiate 15 games in 2003, and one of those groups could have 91 more accepted penalties during the year than the other. That's a difference of six penalties a game. But that was the average discrepancy between the number of flags issued by leading penalty callers ( Walt Anderson's crew) and those signaled by the stingiest crew, Gerry Austin 's. On the average, an Austin game had 11.1 stoppages of play for penalties, while an Anderson game had 17.1.

IMaybe I pick weird things to get upset about, but I think this is ridiculous. One or two games you can explain away, but on only one weekend that both of these crews worked did the Austin crew have more accepted penalties than Anderson's. Highest numbers of penalties called by Anderson and Co.: 33, 26, 19, 19, 18, 18 and 18. Austin's men had one game with more than 14 called fouls in a game -- they called 21 in Week 2.