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Last year, the NFL officially adopted for the postseason that which many believed the NFL was unofficially allowing from time to time during the regular season: Use of the replay-review pipeline to the league office for reasons other than replay review.

Via Mark Maske of the Washington Post, those procedures could be adopted for the regular season next week at the May meeting of NFL owners.

For the 2015 postseason, the NFL allowed the officials and the league office to talk to each other regarding administrative issues relating to three key areas: (1) proper down and distance; (2) penalty enforcement; and (3) game-clock issues. From time to time during the 2015 regular season, media members and former employees of the league’s officiating department suspected that the communications system was being used for these technically unauthorized purposes.

Last December, it was believed that the officially enhanced use of the communication system would not be adopted for the regular season. (Indeed, no proposal regarding expanded use of the communications system was made prior to the annual league meetings in March.) Using the system to correct administrative mistakes during the regular season makes it harder to ensure consistency when multiple games are being played simultaneously, given the limited number of league-office employees who are in position to assist the game crews.

Then again, the potential for embarrassment to the league becomes magnified when only one game is being played. Those games — typically during the regular season, in prime time — will be protected against the kind of gaffes that create controversy on a widespread scale. While this creates a potential disadvantage for teams relegated to the crowded 1:00 p.m. ET starting time, any effort to rely on the league office to rectify mistakes in real time is better than no effort by the league office to rectify mistakes in real time.