The Best Play of Football Season Is Fox’s : Television: Its breathtaking $1.58-billion, four-year bid seems certain to have a wide impact beyond sports. Fox has an important new identity.

For the television industry, the real Super Bowl this season isn’t Sunday’s Dallas-Buffalo confrontation.

The real Super Bowl is already over--at least for network programmers.

It took place when Fox Broadcasting swiped the weekly National Football Conference games from CBS with a breathtaking $1.58- billion, four-year bid--a move that seems certain to have a wide impact on network and local TV competition, far beyond merely the sports arena.

Among other things, CBS, in blowing its 38-year football trademark, lost some valuable weeks of lead-in protection for its prized prime-time asset--the Sunday night tandem of “60 Minutes” and “Murder, She Wrote,” the cornerstones of the network in ratings competition.

On those weeks--last Sunday, for instance--the CBS football lead-in has given both shows an extra needed edge, a key factor at a time when ABC is suddenly challenging the No. 1 network for the top rung.

If “60 Minutes” and “Murder, She Wrote” continue to retain all or most of their audience after Fox begins its NFC football broadcasts, effective this fall, their reputations as two of the most awesomely successful series in TV history will only be enhanced--and CBS will escape cheaply enough in the Sunday competition.

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But Sunday prime time often is the battleground for the biggest network audiences of the week, and Fox, with football, now has a lethal new weapon to help its own high-profile lineup, which includes “Married . . . With Children” and “Martin.”

“Obviously, football broadcasts on Sunday afternoon will provide us with a promotional platform and lead-in, the likes of which we’ve never previously enjoyed,” says Sandy Grushow, president of the Fox Entertainment Group.

But Peter Tortorici, executive vice president of CBS Entertainment, counters that while he’s “not happy” his network lost football, “I would have been less happy at keeping it at the loss of $600 million.

“I won’t try to say there’s no impact. There are minor consequences. Everybody assumes that football is a lead-in to ’60 Minutes’ every week, and it’s not. And, after 25 years, the American public knows when and where to find ’60 Minutes.’ On the perception level, people are saying this is big trouble. But on the reality level, it is what it is.”

The irony of Fox’s coup, which includes the signing of announcers John Madden, Pat Summerall and Terry Bradshaw, is that the network borrowed a similar ploy that CBS used in the recent past to try to improve its future--vastly overpaying for a sports franchise as a loss-leader in hopes it will profit the company in many other ways.

When CBS paid more than $1 billion for major league baseball rights a few years back, the move was--and still is--attacked as corporate stupidity. It became a much-ridiculed burden that put CBS in a deep financial hole. But, most important, it was a statement by a troubled network to its employees, advertisers and the TV industry that it intended to stay in business.

In retrospect, it may well have been a major turning point in reversing the fortunes of CBS. For within a short time, the new sense of commitment helped lift CBS out of the ratings basement to the No. 1 network position it now is trying to claim for the third consecutive season.

Fox’s move in buying into pro football is surely less desperate than was CBS’ investment in baseball.

The young Fox organization has done quite well and now has expanded to seven nights a week of prime time, but it has highly visible shortcomings in key areas when matched against the Big Three networks. Among these are late-night programming--where it has failed from Joan Rivers to Chevy Chase--as well as the lack of a full-scale news operation and, of course, sports.

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Now, with pro football, the sports area is immensely shored up. In addition, it gives Fox an important new identity in the expanding world of TV channels--where brand names and trademarks are crucial to make a network stand out.

What’s more, Fox’s owned and affiliated stations now have a highly visible and salable product--pro football--that can only strengthen them and make them more important in their markets. There is nothing more important that a network can give its stations to ensure loyalty.

The Fox purchase of football thus was smart--but also because of key problems at the network that were emerging. The Chevy Chase failure was a nightmare and an embarrassment. Fox programming, determinedly different under former boss Barry Diller, seemed more mainstream. (Diller once looked at ABC’s “Twin Peaks” and said that it should have been on Fox.)

Fox was, and is, often tasteless, but it thrived on walking a tightrope and, above all, being talked about--from “The Simpsons” to “Married . . . With Children” to “In Living Color” to “Beverly Hills, 90210” to “Cops” to the old “Tracey Ullman Show.” It badly needed some new pizazz to push all the big and small problems into the background.

Football has given Fox that pizazz, although the network now suddenly is beginning to shed its old individuality--for football is ultimate mainstream television. And Fox has been saying since last year that it now wants to appeal to a slightly older audience in addition to its core of 18-to-34-year-old viewers.

Fox is beginning to look more and more like a Big Three wanna-be--the way the fledgling ABC network in the 1950s upset apple carts left and right until it became successful enough to measure up to CBS and NBC.

No wonder that ABC founder Leonard Goldenson saw parallels in the birth of that network and Fox.

For viewers, the important thing is what Fox will do with football. It is foolish to think that it won’t alter the presentation to cater to its younger audience. Madden, at least, symbolizes a certain sense of tradition. At the same time, he comes on like a guy shot out of a cannon--which may suit him perfectly for Fox.

He is a genuine free-swinging, pop-off kind of guy, a TV natural. It’s surprising someone didn’t cast him in a sitcom remake of “The Life of Riley” years ago. He could play Homer Simpson. It would not be too shocking to see Madden in other programming besides football on Fox.

In the end, the game’s still the thing in football. But when Fox is bad, it plunges to depths unmatched at the Big Three. And the question is whether Fox, which also swiped the Emmy Awards show in 1987 and almost destroyed it, will try to jazz up its football presentation to the point of alienating a loyal audience. Will we be longing for the quiet musings of Howard Cosell?

CBS, now on top, clearly had the willies about risking another financial debacle. So Fox has the ball. It will also have the Super Bowl in 1997. We will know a lot about Fox’s game plan by then.