PHOENIX -- The hapless Arizona Cardinals may be about to get sacked by the Arizona Legislature.

A Senate panel will consider a proposal Tuesday to ban any team playing in a publicly financed "multipurpose stadium'' from restricting reporters and photographers from the sidelines during regular season games. The only team that would affect is the Cardinals.

The National Football League announced just this week it was altering its year-old policy that said there could be a photographer from only one local station from each team's home city on the sidelines. Whichever station was chosen would have to share the video with everyone else under a "pool'' arrangement.

It was that 2006 rule that provoked the complaints from some Arizona stations -- and the proposal by Rep. John Nelson, R-Litchfield Park that will be debated this coming week. The NFL will now allow photographers from up to five stations.

But Nelson isn't yanking the bill: He fears that what the league gives, it can take away again.

And John Misner, president and general manager of KPNX-TV, the Phoenix NBC affiliate, said that new limit of five ultimately may not be enough if some Spanish-language stations want to put videographers on the field.

Mark Dalton, spokesman for the Cardinals, which are coming off a 5-11 season, said the 2006 rule was a simple matter of preventing sideline congestion. But he also said the NFL wanted to "get a better handle on what we consider our most valuable property, which is the content and the live footage of NFL games, which is really our most valuable asset.''

That referred to the possibility some videographer would put those sidelines shots on the Internet. Misner said there is no evidence TV videographers have created any sort of hazard. And he noted the NFL policy never restricted the number of newspaper and magazine photographers on the sidelines.

As to a station employee selling video, he said "it is much more likely that a fan in the stadium with a cell phone camera or just a stand-alone video camera might do something like that.'' NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said the rules don't keep stations from airing video of the games. He said they have had access to the official footage.

Misner, however, said that's not enough. He said station videographers shoot the sideline action among the players and coaches and some of the behind-the-scenes activities, as well as game highlights.

"It's the kind of video that Arizona fans have come to love an appreciate,'' he said.

Nelson said legislative intervention is justified given that tax revenues financed the majority of the new $370 million Cardinals stadium in Glendale.

He said camera restrictions are a step by the NFL teams to monopolize the video of games and boost the revenues they get from the broadcast rights. Yet he said "they always manage to plead their poor-boy case and we have to have public funds to build them a palace to play in.'' Aiello suggested the NFL was being generous in even allowing cameras to record the event. He said TV stations are not guaranteed such access to other events in publicly financed arenas like concerts.

But Nelson said the stadium was built specifically for the Cardinals, who share in the profits of its operation and even get to keep the more than $154 million the privately owned University of Phoenix paid for naming rights for the next two decades.