GOOD, BAD OF SHORTER BUILDUP.

Byline: Doug Krikorian

ATLANTA - Without the customary two-week break between the NFL conference-championship games and the Super Bowl, you will be bombarded with tedious opinions on what effect the briefer interlude will have on the participants.

Actually, I don't think the outcome of Super Bowl XXXIV between the St. Louis Rams and Tennessee Titans - or the tone of the proceedings - would be any different if it were played on Feb. 6 at the Georgia Dome instead of Sunday, when the game to end all games for hype, ticket scalping and crass commercialization will be staged.

Oh, perhaps the Titans' star receiver, Yancey Thigpen, nursing a bum foot, would be healthier in two weeks, but I'm not sure his status will determine the fate of his team.

And I'm sure a 14-day layoff would have given the owner of the Rams, Georgia Frontiere, a greater opportunity to undergo one of her celebrated nip-and-tuck makeovers in London before making her grand Super Bowl appearance at a stadium that was not, contrary to propaganda now being disseminated by her PR minions, named after her for her Mother Teresa contributions to humankind.

Still, it's indisputable that the shorter break will have a dramatic impact - positive and negative - on peripheral developments affiliated with the Super Bowl:

Positive: We'll only have to endure a week of the Georgia Frontiere Story, a heartwarming saga that reached its watershed moment on April 1, 1979, when her sixth husband, Carroll Rosenbloom, ran afoul of a riptide in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida, which resulted in Georgia inheriting the Rams.

Negative: America's most enduring entrepreneurs, ticket brokers, won't have their usual cushy two weeks to procure and move their precious commodities.

Positive: We will be spared 14 consecutive days of shameless self-promotion by Fox Sports of the All-Madden team, named in honor of a once-entertaining fellow who's been retired for years even though he and those propping him up on the Fox network aren't aware of that fact.

Negative: The Super Bowl players won't have the two-week luxury to sit on their tickets and wait for the prices to skyrocket out of sight. Why, some could become so disillusioned that they might even be moved to share their ticket allotment this time with family members beyond mom and dad, and even with some old high school chums.

Positive: America's most fiercely original thinkers, radio disc jockeys, will shockingly all come up with the same enlightened idea of reviving one of the great disco songs of all time, Rick James' ``Super Freak,'' in tribute to the Titans' extraordinary, 6-foot-5, 265-pound rookie defensive end, Jevon Kearse, whose nickname is The Freak.

Negative: Reporters will be in a mad scramble to come up with exotic angles and some inevitably will extricate from well-deserved obscurity Buddy Ryan, Mike Ditka's onetime sparring partner with the Chicago Bears who would have you believe he invented the art of coaching football. You see, the Tennessee head coach, Jeff Fisher, once served as Ryan's assistant for five seasons with the Philadelphia Eagles, although Fisher somehow avoided picking up Ryan's egotistical habits.

Positive: We'll only be subjected briefly to the Bud Adams Story, a stirring narration about a spoiled son of a Texas millionaire oilman who played a vital role in changing the landscape of professional sports in 1960 when he and the Kansas City Chiefs' Lamar Hunt started a fledging enterprise called the American Football League. Adams might now be a hero in Tennessee, but the Titans' owner remains a despised figure in Texas for moving the Oilers out of the state.

Negative: John Shaw, Georgia Frontiere's notorious financial hitman who choreographed the Rams' scandalous dissipation in Southern California, will have a greater opportunity to hide from his critics.

Positive Dick Vermeil, a control freak by nature, won't have that extra week to keep the media from prying into the lives and careers of his players.

SUPER BOWL XXXIV

St. Louis Rams (13-3) vs. Tennessee Titans (13-3)

--When: Sunday. 3:25 p.m.

--Where: Georgia Dome

--TV: Channel 7 (ABC)

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