NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Playoff systems are not born easily in sports. But once they're created, they tend to dwarf what has gone before them.

So Nascar's announcement this week of a radical new way to select its champion -- resetting the points total with 10 races to go in the season to give more drivers a shot at the newly-named Nextel Cup -- is a big deal for what has become the nation's second-most popular sport.

So far reaction from the fans, and some commentators, has been negative. Drivers are generally cautiously uncertain.

But NBC, which will broadcast most of the "Chase for the Championship" races, is thrilled with the possible windfall of extra viewership.

Racing and television officials insist that Nascar, not the networks, came up with the new system. "I wish I had thought of it," NBC Sports president Ken Schanzer told me this week. "When we first heard about it in October, we said, 'Let us think about it.'

"Like a lot of fans, we thought 'You're going to tamper with something very good, and change tends to be threatening to people,'" he said. "But the more we thought about it, the more we thought it would enhance the arc of the season."

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Nascar is unique in putting its biggest event of the year, the Daytona 500, first on the schedule in February. It provides a strong Sunday afternoon sporting event in the football-free months. But by September, Nascar fans often know who is going to win the championship, so the sport starts to lose viewers to the NFL. Baseball's October post-season only adds to the problems.

NBC, which together with Turner Sports is paying $1.2 billion for 20 races a year over six years, will get the last eight races this season. Last year, its final seven races had an average rating of about 4.5.

That compares to about a 5.6 average it had in the five races through Aug. 31, and a 5.9 average for the first-half of the season on Fox, excluding Daytona.

Neither Schanzer nor broadcast officials with Nascar will take any guess as to what the new format could mean for the late-season races. But the impact could be huge.

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Playoff viewership for football, basketball and hockey is about double their average regular-season national broadcasts. Baseball sees its ratings jump nearly 300 percent during the post-season.

NBC and Turner Sports won't have to pay anything more for any additional viewers during the remaining three seasons on their current deal with Nascar. So they seem to be the big winners in the change, far more than Fox (which airs its races during the first half of the season).

"Fox recognized the value for the sport, and that what's good for sport is good for them," said Dick Glover, Nascar's vice president of broadcasting.

Anyway, it's not clear how long NBC will see a boost from the new format.

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The General Electric-owned network has shied away from money-losing, big-dollar sports rights deals. As recently as the late 1990s, NBC was home to the championships of football, baseball and basketball. It has none of those sports now.

Fox has taken a $297 million charge for losses on the Nascar over its eight-year $1.6 billion deal. One can presume NBC has lost as least as much, though GE (GE: Research, Estimates) won't give a dollar value of that loss,

The timing of this change means that Nascar will have one year of data, if not two, when it starts to negotiate a new TV contract for the second half of its season. The circuit is hoping that unlike some other sports rights deals, racing is in for a healthy increase next time out, rather than flat or declining rights dollars.

"Nascar is not doing this to leverage our television partners, it's doing it to improve the sport," said Nascar television consultant Neal Pilson. "If in process we improve television ratings, we'll have that in mind when we sit down to negotiate again."

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In other words, even if NBC is the short-term winner of the Nascar points system change, it could be find itself out of the race altogether before long.

The payoff may be few years away, but there does seem to be one sure winner out of all this: Nascar's bottom line.