The Steelers avoided a potential embarrassment to the NFL when Ben Roethlisberger threw a touchdown pass to Santonio Holmes with 35 seconds left to beat Arizona, 27-23, in Super Bowl XLIII. Now, they'd like to head off another one.

Art and Dan Rooney would like to change the overtime rule.

"We'd like to see each team get one possession,'' said Steelers president Art Rooney II. "Not make it anything that has to be a dramatic change but really just have each team get one possession before we have to get into our sudden-death situation."

In the NFL, the first team to score in overtime wins -- by safety, field goal or touchdown. If the receiving team returns the overtime kickoff back all the way, the game is over.

No Super Bowl has ever been decided in overtime, but few have come as close as the Steelers and Cardinals on Feb. 1 in Tampa. Had Holmes not had both toes in bounds to make his memorable 6-yard touchdown reception, the Steelers would have had one more play before they would have attempted a short field goal to send the game into overtime.

And that would have set up a real possibility that the game would end without one team ever having a chance to touch the ball on offense. NFL statistics show that the team that won the coin toss in overtime in 2008 games won 43.4 percent of the time on the first possession, and 63.3 percent of the overtime games.

Said Rich McKay, the league competition committee co-chairman about those statistics, "They are troubling to me personally in the sense that I would like to see a game that you would think was 'more balanced.'''

Yet, McKay and Ray Anderson, the NFL executive executive vice president of football operations, said they've found no sentiment in talks with management, the players and their union to change the rules.

The Rooneys have a different opinion and while the topic is not on the agenda for the NFL meetings that open today near Los Angeles, the two Steelers officials would like to talk about a change in overtime.

And their recent Super Bowl experience hit home for them.

"It sure did,'' Art Rooney said. "You think about it, that was a great game. If we don't score the touchdown and kick the field goal and go into overtime, maybe you kick off to them and they hit one pass to Larry Fitzgerald and kick a field goal, it's over.

"To me it shouldn't be that way. We should at least get one shot at it, particularly in a game like that. It's something we were in favor of when it came up a couple of years ago and thought maybe there was a chance."

It was on the agenda two years ago at the NFL spring meetings and went nowhere. While Rooney would like to see the change in every game, he'd settle for a change just for the playoffs, the way Major League Baseball last year unilaterally instituted a rule that there would be no rain-shortened games in the World Series.

Art Rooney also is concerned that some proposed new "safety" rules might make the game more difficult to officiate. He's particularly interested in the so-called Hines Ward Rule proposal that would not allow a player to throw a "blind-side" block to the head of a defender.

"In general you want to see player safety,'' Rooney said, "but when it comes down to how are they going to officiate these individual plays it does make us nervous.

"All of these little points of emphasis. Does it make the game harder to officiate? So that's something we keep getting concerned with, how they're going to officiate those rules. The helmet-to-helmet contact thing, that's usually not that difficult to officiate that, you can see that. But not when you start to say it's a blind-side block, what does that mean?

"So you start to get into these things, how are they going to officiate it? We're not really for a real dramatic change on those kinds of things."