When the National Football League moguls convened in Palm Desert, California for their annual spring owners' meeting this week, several pressing items headed up the agenda. With the league set to expand to 32 teams in 2002, a new divisional realignment is obviously on the cards, and the future of instant replay in reversing or upholding officials' on-field calls was a matter still obviously in need of some tweaking.

While the owners, finding themselves unable to arrive at a consensus, tabled both of those topics for future discussion, they did find themselves in apparently unanimous agreement on one momentous issue.

Bandanas

For the past decade, harkening back to the NFL debut of Deion Sanders, certain players have increasingly taken to protecting their carefully coiffured hairstyles by wearing colourful kerchiefs underneath their helmets.

The devotees of this fashion seem to fairly revel in the fact that it conjures up an image of the dastardly 18th-century pirate, although, to tell the truth, a 300lb lineman with a kerchief on his head is apt to come off looking less like Captain Blood than Aunt Jemima.

The owners, along with NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, knew they had to tread somewhat gingerly when it came to an issue with patently racial overtones. By and large the demarcation line is clear: Black guys wear bandanas. White guys don't.

So rather than come down with a heavy-handed decree from the commissioner's office, or have the owners submit it to a vote among themselves, the NFL owners assayed a deft end-run: In what was, depending on one's perspective, either a tactful bit of diplomacy or an act of incredible cowardice, they handed L'Affaire Bandana off to a subcommittee, packaged it in the midst of several other "sportsmanship" issues, and then marched Dennis Green out to make the announcement to the press.

Cute.

Green is the head coach of the Minnesota Vikings. He also happens to be black. He serves on the NFL's competition committee, and even more conveniently, he has for the past 10 years enforced a Vikings' team rule forbidding bandana wear on Sunday afternoons.

"It has nothing to do with anything other than the football uniform," explained Green. "You don't see baseball players wearing them - and just because the commissioner says the Vikings don't wear them doesn't mean it's me against the black guys. The uniform consists of what a player wears - and that's from the shoes to the top of the head."

The league's contention is that wearing individual accoutrements violates the league's uniform policy. "We have exacting uniform standards for everything except what people put on their heads," said Tagliabue in defence of the proposed regulation.

Indeed, the NFL employs its own brand of Fashion Police. At each and every game, a representative of the league office - usually a former player - is on duty in the press box. This fellow's sole function is to issue citations for uniform violations. Players can be (and are, regularly) fined for everything from having their shirt-tails out to baggy stockings to displaying excessive tape on their shoes.

There are even guidelines regulating the length and colour of allowable accessories such as towels and gloves. Since bandanas have been around for more than a decade, you might ask, why are the owners only now getting around to addressing the subject?

Two words: Ray Lewis.

The NFL's carefully-cultivated image took several big hits last season, but none larger than that engendered by the spectacular season of the Baltimore linebacker, who began 2000 in an Atlanta jail cell, accused of a double murder, and finished it as Super Bowl XXV's Most Valuable Player.

That Lewis' swaggering, defiant, and decidedly unrepentant stance was accompanied by a bandana atop his head may have doomed the fashion forever.

It was announced, in any case, that Green's subcommittee had voted 8-0 to Ban the Bandana, making ratification by the owners a likely formality.

That this recommendation came as part of an overall endorsement tightening existing rules against taunting, trash-talking, chest-bumping, and extraneous showboating makes it clear enough that the owners have grown both wary and weary of the thuggish image which has come to be equated with the bandana brigade.

You may rest assured, however, that the bandana devotees aren't going to see it that way. They are going to claim that the league is trying to stifle expressions of individualism, and, moreover, they're going to claim that the proposed new rule is racially inspired. And they could be right on both counts.