Tonight on your television, actual consequential NFL football, which, though it's now down to about 2.8 percent of all NFL-related programming, still reliably delivers an entertainment wallop.

---

NFL Kickoff

• Game: Saints vs. Colts, 8 p.m. today.
• Where: RCA Dome, Indianapolis.
• TV: WPXI.

---

The defending Super Bowl champion Indianapolis Colts, trying to become the only team in history to win 12 or more games in five consecutive seasons, and the NFC runner-up New Orleans Saints, trying not to become conspicuous one-hit wonders in an otherwise historically unimpressive football existence, meet on NBC to ring in what has become known as Kickoff Weekend. There's a Sunday night game, two Monday night games, and a typically bountiful 12-course Sunday afternoon that includes nothing less cataclysmic than Steelers-Browns.

It all sounds so delicious on its own merit, I wonder sometimes whether it's anticipated almost as much as a merciful respite from all the fluff.

The NFL Network has the league on 24/7, Comcast has Steelers 24/7, NFL.com has video highlights of every game available 24/7, the so called offseason, now a quaint anachronism, has vanished from the face of the media earth, eclipsed by the hyperventilated 24/7 run-up to the draft, the free-agent signing period, the scouting combine, the minicamps, the maxicamps, the organized team activities, the disorganized team activities, the fantasy leagues, the video game industry, the never-ending merchandising schematics, the dogfighting, I mean thank God for an actual meaningful game.

If you don't think this league's astounding popularity surpasses itself every year, know that when the NFL announced that the New York Giants and Miami Dolphins, two middling outfits of questionable aptitude, would play each other Oct. 28 in London, there was a flash flood of 500,000 ticket requests that soaked Park Avenue.

A half million people?

"The NFL is well beyond sports," said John Rash of the Campbell-Mithun media-buying agency. "It's a national phenomenon."

The Super Bowl remains the most valuable brand name in sports, followed in order somewhat distantly by the Summer Olympics, the FIFA World Cup, the Daytona 500, and, of course, the Wild Things.

But monstrous sporting success invites equally monstrous scrutiny, and the single biggest perceived problem with sport's best-run league continues to be player behavior. In a new wrinkle this season, team captains will be wearing a 'C' on their jersey, just like in hockey. I point this out so you don't think the 'C' is for convicted.

"I don't think it's just a matter of the scrutiny," Steelers Chairman Dan Rooney said yesterday. "I think [commissioner] Roger [Goodell] has made a point that he's not going to tolerate it, and he's done it right. He's talked to the union, he's talked to the players individually, he's talked to the players that have been fined and suspended.

"Commissioners have dealt with this problem all the way back to [Bert] Bell and Pete [Rozelle], when we were still trying to grow the game. There wasn't as much of this bad behavior then because I think players were just thankful to have a job, have a position on the team, but I don't want people to think the players in the league now are just spoiled rotten. Overall I think football players are really good people. It's just that there are so many more players now, in all sports, that when anyone does something bad it tends to blanket everybody. It's a shame because basically they're pretty sound guys trying to do good things. You look at a guy like Charlie Batch, he's phenomenal in terms of what he's done for this community."

Goodell's offseason was consumed almost exclusively with discipline and preventative pleading with players to stay out of trouble. He talked about "protecting the shield," honoring the league with responsible behavior, in part because it's right and in part because Dan Rooney knows and Roger Goodell knows that no matter much good Charlie Batch and hundreds of NFL players like him do, they can't generate 1 percent of the publicity of a Michael Vick, a Pac-Man Jones, a Chris Henry or a Tank Johnson.

In some sense then, the NFL is victimized by its own success in this regard. There is so much interest in this league that the news hole is infinite.

"Pete Rozelle had this theory that you can have too much exposure," Rooney said. "He feared overexposure. I remember going to him with [Dallas Cowboys executive] Tex Schramm, trying to convince him to allow us to televise home games that were already sold out. He said, 'You saw what happened to boxing. They had the Friday night fights, the Monday night fights, and before you knew it, it was on four nights a week!' "

Rozelle was ultimately proven wrong on that, even if it took 50 years. For this highly overexposed moment then, there is actual game action to enjoy, at least right up until the minute the ramp-up to the Dec. 10 Vick sentencing begins. I think that's tomorrow.