Reaction Mixed to Playoff Changes : NFL: New rules hurt some division champions, but spur fan interest of extra wild-card teams.

The road to the Super Bowl this year is taking some new twists and turns.

As the NFL’s best clubs head into their final regular-season games this weekend, they are playing by several new rules:

--Six wild-card teams, instead of four, will join the six division champions in the playoffs that start Jan. 5-6.

--One division champion from each conference will have to beat a wild-card team that weekend to gain the second round Jan. 12-13.

--Only four division champions, the two with the best records in each conference, will get byes the first week.

In previous years, all division winners were excused from first-round competition, earning, in effect, a two-week vacation.

The difference this year is that in two of the six divisions--one AFC, one NFC--winning the championship will award not a champion’s benefits but a wild-card handicap.

After striving all year for the honor of finishing first, these two winners will discover that it’s somewhat of an empty honor.

Is that fair? Is it a good idea?

There are two ways to look at it.

First, the new plan should please most pro football fans. Instead of a comparatively quiet, one-day, two-game, wild-card weekend, there will be a more appealing two-day, four-game opening round.

A total of eight, instead of four, teams in the first round of a monthlong single-elimination tournament could double the early excitement.

But even so, the new format is seemingly unjust to the division winners, who are being treated like wild cards. It rewards the champions that happen to be in divisions that are relatively easy to dominate.

“The players really didn’t give the league a choice,” said George Young, general manager of the New York Giants. “Where do you think the money’s going to come from to pay all these guys?”

More games, more television income. Or more precisely, the club owners will make more money by making their product available to more football fans--who are glad to have it.

“But I wish we didn’t have to do it,” said Ralph Wilson, owner of the Buffalo Bills. “It’s too unfair to two teams.”

The example of a fan who approves comes from a baseball executive, Tom Grieve, general manager of the Texas Rangers, who said: “There’s been a lot more Cowboy interest in Dallas this month with their chance to get one of the new wild cards.

“With that kind of interest, how can it hurt the (NFL)?”

Down the road, it can hurt in several ways, according to a veteran NFL club executive who asserted that if former Commissioner Pete Rozelle and former Dallas President Tex Schramm were still in charge, the league wouldn’t have made this change.

Requesting anonymity, he said: “The league has lost the importance of division championships.

“For years, we have been telling the fans that winning the division is what the whole regular season is all about. Now we’re telling them that a champion is no more important than a wild card.”

The NFL’s emphasis, in other words, has shifted suddenly, if subtly, from winning division titles to making the playoffs.

Commissioner Paul Tagliabue holds that that isn’t all bad.

Noting that all 14 NFC teams were “still alive in the playoff chase” in the 14th week of a 17-week season, Tagliabue said: “That’s what the additional wild-card team does for competition. We anticipated added competition and excitement, and we have it. Division leaders can’t relax now.”

Under the new rules, leaders who relax, as they did too often in the controversial late-season games of other years, risk losing first-round byes.

Moreover, Tagliabue said, “The addition of two more wild-card teams reduces the possibility of excluding a runner-up team with a record superior to that of (a champion in another division).”

That is more than a possibility. It has happened often in a league that since 1978 has turned up 11 teams that failed to make the NFL playoffs after winning 10 or more games.

In those years, the NFL’s leaders were charged with unfairness for a set of rules that admitted 9-7 or 8-8 teams to the playoffs--simply because they had won the championship--while eliminating 10-6 teams from other divisions.

Injustice is somewhat inherent in any playoff system. And that has been true since the first sports playoff series, baseball’s first World Series in 1903.

Although, since then, the best two ballclubs have more than once held membership in the same league--in the view of baseball executives, players and writers--the World Series matches teams from different leagues.

Is the NFL’s large new television contract too steep a price to pay for downgrading two division champions?

It depends, no doubt, on whether you’re getting a cut. The 28 clubs will each average $32 million annually from the TV companies in the first four years of the 1990s.

All three commercial networks will be involved in playoff telecasts.

Said Giant General Manager Young: “We’re in a profit-making business. We aren’t stealing this money. We’re giving our customers more, not less, entertainment.”

Will the division champions with the worst records gain anything substantial from their new status as wild cards?

They may be comforted in two ways:

--Each of their players will get $10,000 for playing in the first round. Thus if they should eventually win the Super Bowl, as a wild-card Raider team once did, they will make $10,000 more next month than any 49er stands to earn if San Francisco repeats.

--More significantly, most football players have said for years that they dislike the two-week layoff before the Super Bowl, which, incidentally, has been done away with, at least this time around. This season, when the NFL instituted midseason one-week byes for all, they said it again.

“You can have those . . . byes,” observed Richard Dent of the Chicago Bears, a Pro Bowl player, echoing the sentiments of many other players. “I’d much rather get into the rhythm of playing every week.”

The rhythm of playing regularly: the coaches and players all prefer it. But it won’t be everyone who has that privilege next month. Just the wild cards and two lowly division champions.

The NFL’s playoff schedule (times, teams and places to be announced):

FIRST ROUND, JAN. 5-6

In each conference:

The division champion with the third-best regular-season record will be at home to the wild-card team with the third-best record.

The wild-card team with the best record will be at home to the other wild card. (The former prohibition on intra-division games has been removed.)

SECOND ROUND, JAN. 12-13

In the divisional playoff games, champions with the two best regular-season records in each conference will be at home to first-round winners.

The rules assure that the division champions with the best records will play the first-round winners who have the worst records.

THIRD ROUND, JAN. 20

In the conference championship games, the home team in each conference will be the surviving playoff winner with the best regular-season record.

A wild card can’t play host unless two wild cards have advanced.

NFL policies provide that in the first three rounds, cold-weather games, if any, will be played first each day. A warmer-weather or dome matchup will be the second game each time.

SUPER BOWL XXV, JAN. 27

Game to be played at Tampa Stadium, Tampa, Fla.

* GIANT WOES: The injury to Phil Simms’ right foot reportedly includes a slight fracture in one of the bones. C2