NEW YORK — By late this morning, time will either run out on Matt Walsh’s 15 minutes, or another quarter will be put in the meter and he’ll stay around a little longer.

Signs indicate that the final seconds on Walsh’s time are ticking away.

At 7:30 a.m., the former New England Patriots video assistant will sit down with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell for a much-anticipated meeting.

With Walsh turning in the Patriots’ videos he had to NFL offices last week, and the revelation that a tape of the St. Louis Rams’ walk-through before Super Bowl XXXVI in 2002 was not among them, some of the intrigue surrounding the meeting has been taken away.

Yesterday the league sent out an e-mail saying that the post-meeting news conference could begin as early as 9 o’clock, and not 10 o’clock as originally announced, leading to the assumption that Walsh won’t tell Goodell much that the commissioner doesn’t already know.

Perhaps now the most interesting thing left to discover is whether Walsh and his attorney, Michael Levy, will accept Goodell’s invitation to appear at the news conference or whether they will use their meeting with Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., in Washington, D.C., later today as a reason not to attend.

The eight videos Walsh submitted, covering six games during the 2000-2002 seasons, are similar to the tapes New England submitted last September: the camera trains on defensive coaches sending signals in to players, then pans up to show the clock, down and distance.

During last year’s investigation, New England coach Bill Belichick admitted to taping throughout his tenure as Patriots’ coach, which began in 2000. The punishment levied at that time, a $500,000 fine for Belichick, $250,000 fine for the franchise and loss of the team’s natural first-round pick in last month’s draft, was understood to cover the entirety of New England’s taping, not just the Sept. 9 game against the Jets in which he was caught breaking a NFL rule regarding taping .

Some national media outlets have made a big deal that one of the tapes shows Miami coaches sending in “offensive signals,” though outside of flashing signs for personnel groupings, such as a two-tight-end, two-running-back set, there are no offensive signals. With the headset in quarterbacks’ helmets, there is no need.

And with headsets in defensive players’ helmets this season, there won’t be much of a need for the sideline signals that started this brouhaha much longer either.

Walsh became a person of interest for Goodell in the days preceding this year’s Super Bowl, when both The New York Times and espn.com had articles with quotes from Walsh, who hinted that he might have information the league would find important. On the eve of the Patriots’ clash with the New York Giants, the Boston Herald published an article saying that a member of New England’s video staff had taped the Rams’ walk-through, citing an anonymous source.

In an interview with The New York Times last week, Levy said that Walsh was not the source for the Herald story.

NFL officials, who had already interviewed members of the New England staff extensively as part of their investigation, spoke with vice president of player personnel Scott Pioli about the charges when the team was still in Phoenix for Super Bowl XLII, and Belichick was interviewed again after the loss to the Giants.

During the last few months, Belichick has repeatedly denied that his team taped the Rams’ walk-through and has said he does not watch his own team’s walk-throughs.

smanza@projo.com