All the owner did, by acting as quickly as he did once the season was over, was try to look confident giving both of them what sounded more like a no-confidence vote the longer he spoke with the media.

“[It] better not take too long [for them to get results], because I’ve just about run out of patience,” Mara finally said.

Of course that begged a question from just about any Giants fan I know:

You mean the season we all just witnessed didn’t get you there, patience-wise? Because if 3-14, if the bottom falling out the way it did, really from the time the Giants got thrown down a flight of steps on the opening Sunday of the season against the Vikings, wasn’t enough to make him run out of patience with his current operation, what’s it going to take?

After the mistake of having Dave Gettleman as their general manager — and, to be fair to Gettleman, both Schoen and Daboll really made the playoffs a couple of years ago with what was essentially Gettleman’s team — and the coaching mistakes that were Ben McAdoo and Pat Shurmur and the immortal Joe Judge in succession, ownership has now decided not to make any major changes between the merciful end of this season and the beginning of the next one.

Now the current management team is given the responsibility of finding the team a quarterback if Cam Ward or Shedeur Sanders doesn’t fall to the Giants at No. 3. But why would anybody think that Schoen in particular is the right guy to make as important a personnel decision, either in the short run or the long run, as any Giants general manager has ever made at quarterback?

We’ll never know how much input Mara had when the Giants decided to extend Daniel Jones, and for big money, after Jones won them the one playoff game the Giants have won since their last Super Bowl 13 years ago this February. All we know for sure is that Jones’ contract goes on Schoen’s permanent record, even if they were basically able to get out from under it after just two seasons.

And Schoen is the executive who, having seen what we all saw from Jones before Jones hurt his knee in the fall of 2023, came into this season with no-backup plan, none, unless you consider Drew Lock and Tommy Cutlets a big-boy solution at backup quarterback. Jones was coming off an ACL injury, it had become clear early last season that he was never going to be the player and thrower and leader that Giants so desperately wanted him to be after taking him with the No. 6 pick in the draft. So, there was no safety net, not after Schoen realized before the last NFL draft that he wasn’t going to be able to swing a deal with the Patriots and move up to draft Drake Maye.

Now there is speculation that if the Vikings decide to keep Sam Darnold and let J.J. McCarthy go, that the Giants might be in play for McCarthy if either Ward or Sanders doesn’t fall to them. Please remember something, though, if the Giants really are sweet on McCarthy now, then why weren’t they sweet on him last April when they could have taken him with that same No. 6 pick that Gettleman had once used on Jones?

There is so much that is going to happen between now and the draft this coming April, but if it really does play out this way, you have to say it would be a very Giants thing, just because of the way everything has gone with them and for them over the past several years, if they had to perhaps put a No. 1 pick into a package for a quarterback they could have had when he was coming out of Michigan.

Listen, I like John Mara. I loved his father and I loved his mother and I grew up a Giants fan in central New York. There isn’t an owner in pro sports who has more skin in the game, just because of legendary family history, than Mara does. This has been a family business for 100 years. It is a family football business here the way it is in Pittsburgh with the Rooney family and with the Halas/McCaskey family in Chicago where, by the way, as much of a mess as the Bears are, they at least go forward with Caleb Williams.

The Ford family only goes back to 1963 with the Lions. The Cowboys only go back 36 years with Jerry Jones. By the way? It is practically a national pastime, with America’s Team, to make fun of Jones for talking too much, and having one coach after another be on the hot seat down in Dallas. But lately John Mara has started to act like Jones on training wheels. He just has. He said way more than he needed to the other day when he met with the media, as a way of trying to appease his fan base for the decision he’d just made with Schoen and Daboll.

Schoen, you bet, is the guy who let Saquon Barkley, a 2,000-yard rusher, walk out the door, amidst all of his tough talk on “Hard Knocks.” We keep hearing about what a good draft he had last time around. He had a decent draft, after taking Malik Nabers at No. 7, Nabers being such a supremely talented kid and such a baller that he put up the kind of numbers he did when it sometimes had to seem as if the ball was being thrown to him by you and me.

Now Schoen stays, if for no other reason that Mara doesn’t want to hire his third general manager since the Giants won their last Super Bowl with Jerry Reese in that job. According to Mara, Daboll stays, at least in part, because he was Coach of the Year two years ago. I like Daboll, too. He did go 9-7-1 with Jones as his quarterback and the Giants did win that playoff game, on the road, with Jones at quarterback. As I’ve said before, that ain’t nothing. It also ain’t enough for Giants fans these days.

The Giants have been a hot mess. They did not become less of one last Monday morning. All John did was kick the can — what has become a tomato can — down the road. He’s been wrong about a lot of things lately. He needs to be right about this, because the ones who have run out of patience are fans as good as we have around here.

NOTRE DAME’S FREEMAN CAN REALLY COACH, BRING BACK PETE & NOT MISSING AARON THAT MUCH …

That interception Drew Allar threw at the end against Notre Dame made you wonder, in the moment, if Allar were still right-handed.

But Allar isn’t the first quarterback to throw a pick that felt like a walk-off home run, and won’t be the last.

But as bad as Allar’s throw was on Thursday night, it wasn’t nearly as bad as Steve Sarkisian calling for that boneheaded sweep at the goal line at the end of Ohio State vs. Texas on Friday night.

Always remember that Peyton Manning, one of the greatest of them all, cost the Colts a Super Bowl one time when Tracy Porter of the Saints jumped a route on him in Miami.

If it can happen with somebody as great as Manning, it can happen to a college kid in the biggest game of his life.

Incidentally, and whatever happens in the championship game?

Marcus Freeman of Notre Dame has shown himself to be a total coaching star, before he turns 40.

Though you still sort of kind of have to wonder how in the world his team got beat by Northern Illinois.

If Uncle Steve can pony up $765 million for Juan Soto, there has to be a way for him to find enough money under the bed to bring back Pete Alonso.

Right?

The biggest reason of all to think that this Knicks season can end up being better — and longer — than the last one is Karl-Anthony Towns, who continues to put up Patrick Ewing numbers.

The Red Sox getting Garrett Crochet could turn out to be as big a pitching move in the AL East as the Yankees getting Max Fried.

And the Sox are spending a lot less money to do it.

How long before Kyrie gets tired of Dallas?

The Cavs and Thunder played a game the other night that reminded you of how, even in the regular season, the NBA can be so much more than a glorified game of H-O-R-S-E from out there beyond the arc.

Somehow the two teams managed to provide a terrific show while only combining for 26 made 3-pointers.

Imagine that.

The next time you’re watching one of those NFL pre-game shows, see how long they go in any given segment without cracking themselves up.

As a tennis guy, I love the Australian Open, just because it’s on when I go to bed and still on when I wake up in the morning.

I haven’t missed Aaron Rodgers this past week nearly as much as I thought I might.

I’d be perfectly fine if the Mets retired David Wright’s number twice.

Is there some way that the Giants and Jets can get clipped for congestion pricing over on Route 3?

People who still deny that climate change is real also believe that pigs can fly.

The Knicks get the Thunder, one of the two best teams in the league along with the Cavaliers, and then on Sunday they get a Bucks team that has been 17-8 since starting out 2-8. So the Knicks see, and at home, how they measure up, at least for now, against Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and his guys at home, and then Giannis Antetokounmpo and his guys.

Always across the long season, there are loud regular season moments that have a postseason feel. The Knicks get two of them, right here and right now, back-to-back.

Good time for these games to come along, for sure. But still: How good are these Knicks, really?

They absolutely had the 9-game winning streak that ended in Oklahoma City. But that streak included two wins over the Wizards, currently 6-29. One over the Jazz, who are 9-26. One over the 8-29 Raptors and another over the 7-31 Pelicans. The other three wins came against the 22-16 Magic, and the 19-17 Timberwolves, the night Towns put it on his old team.

The reality of this, as always, is that you play who you play, and certainly don’t throw back any wins when you’re trying to retain at least some kind of contact with the Cavs, and with the Celtics. But another reality of the Knicks season is this:

Around that winning streak, so much of it against the dregs of the league, they are a .500 team.

They are also closer in the standings to the 9th place Pistons, who come into the Garden next week, than they are to the first-place Cavaliers. And they face the same questions about depth that they faced last season, and that means before everybody started getting hurt. And make it hard to remember very many games this season when you came away from a Knicks victory thinking how important the guys off the bench were, and that means even when Deuce McBride has been healthy.

Here’s what Leon Rose, who has been a star since taking over the Knicks, said after bringing a star like Towns to the team:

“Karl-Anthony brings a skillset that is unique to the game of basketball. He possesses a blend of playmaking, shooting, rebounding and defending that in combination with his size allows him to compete at a level that is rare in this league.”

Leon may have gotten a little carried away with the part about the unique skill set in a sport that still has LeBron in it, but you get the idea. Rose was taking a big swing here, not for next season, or the one after that. Since the start of the 2023-24 season, though, he’s been swinging away, adding OG Anunoby and Mikal Bridges and Towns, and you see where the Knicks are, sitting in third place in the conference, with only the Cavs and the defending champs ahead of them, even if the Cavs are ahead by a lot.

But a lot of Rose’s draft capital is gone and, if he still thinks this edition of the Knicks needs more, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to make it better at the trade deadline, one year after he swung the trade for Anunoby. Not because Rose doesn’t have his own skill set as an executive, just because he is in a bit of a box.

Without going all inside baseball here, or basketball, the Knicks are currently in the second tier above the luxury tax line, known as the second apron. And landing there comes with a laundry list of penalties and restrictions on spending. Teams in this tier cannot take on more salary than they send out in a trade (teams under the luxury tax line can take back up to 125% of outgoing salary); cannot make use of trade exceptions or bundle multiple players’ salaries in a trade; cannot sign players who have been bought out of their contracts.

Those are some of the tools traditionally used by contending teams to shore up holes during long runs of success or to fabricate a coherent roster around multiple max-contract stars. But these days, the Knicks have access to none of them. Perhaps their most attractive — and expendable — trade chip would be Mitchell Robinson, but with his injury history, what are they going to get in return for Robinson at this point?

Listen: When the Knicks have played their best this season, whatever the opponent, they have shown you what an outstanding starting five they have, and an old-school ability to play from the inside out. Towns has the ability to score big, so does Jalen Brunson, and Bridges, and OG. Josh Hart has the ability, clearly, to go for a triple double on any given night. We see what they all can do, and we know how much of the load they’re already carrying for Tom Thibodeau, and how little help they get off the bench, especially when McBride is hurt.

The Knicks have a starting five more talented than the last one was, without question. They’re fun to watch, they’re a tough out, they even looked as if they might pass the Celtics not too very long ago. Right they’ve got 10 games until LeBron comes to town on Feb. 1, and as they go past the halfway point of the season: Thunder, Bucks, Pistons, 76ers, T’wolves, Hawks, Nets, Kings, Grizzlies, Nuggets. Be a good time for them to get hot again, starting on Friday night. Start showing us how much game they’ve really got.

The Jets have to hire a new general manager, at which point we’ll see if Woody Johnson, who must have been held back at owner school, can get something right for a change. And the Jets have to hire a new coach, one who will then have the opportunity to be the first since Rex (Please Pick Me!) Ryan to get them to the postseason.

And they have to decide whether they are going to bring back Aaron Rodgers, whose presence behind center for the Jets was supposed to change everything, not just with the culture over there at the team’s headquarters at Florham Park, but in the AFC East, too. Instead, and you can check me on this, the signing of Rodgers eventually became one of the great mistakes in the history of the Jets and, well, consider the width and breadth of that statement if even the thought of it doesn’t make you dizzy.

By the way? This isn’t about what we thought would happen, or all the reasons why getting Rodgers out of Green Bay and getting him to Jersey seemed to make so much sense at the time, just because of where the Jets were with Zach Wilson as their quarterback. This isn’t about how this all might have turned out differently if he hadn’t suffered that Achilles injury on Sept. 11, 2023. No. This is about what has happened with Rodgers as a Jet, and what has really happened is this:

The best of it for him and for Jets fans is when he wasn’t playing football.

It was the exciting, jazzed lead-up to Sept. 11 of ’23, and that Monday Night Football Opener against the Bills (which turned out to be one of 11 games the Jets have won with Rodgers as the most expensive employee they’ve ever had). It was even the rehab after he did get injured, and that fever dream he sold himself and the fan base about somehow coming back and playing again before the 2023-24 season ended.

It was all that, followed by the lead-up to this season, this take two for him and for the team, as if he were once again a savior, just one year delayed.

Only then he actually did start playing games. Then the four-time MVP produced one empty fourth quarter after another in a string of winnable games for a team that he was supposed to be taking back to the playoffs, all the way until last Sunday in Buffalo, when he looked like a shot fighter doing everything but quitting on his stool.

Now, depending on how quickly the Jets have a new GM and a new coach, the circus of will-he-or-won’t-he? on the possibility of his return could play out into the new year. And if that won’t be as much of a circus as the season has been, it will be like a bad movie, a screwball comedy for sure, that simply won’t end.

The irony of this, even though it is always a risky thing to put more irony into play around the Jets, is that if Rodgers does leave, which he should, then the Jets are in exactly the same place they were when they brought him here in the first place. And still don’t have a quarterback.

And you know what that means? It puts them, almost spectacularly, in the same place as the Giants. Who also might be looking for a new general manager, or a new coach, or both. We thought the Giants were set up to get the No. 1 overall pick in this April’s draft and have to decide between Shedeur Sanders and Cam Ward. Then they beat the Colts at home last Sunday, and showed you that they manage to lose even when they win.

The Giants still consider themselves to be an elite franchise. But they haven’t been for a long time; really haven’t been since they won their last Super Bowl with Jerry Reese still the general manager and Tom Coughlin still the coach and Eli Manning still at quarterback. Now they have lost their way, and have just produced as bad a season as they have had in the 100 years since they opened up for business back in 1925. Even having made the playoffs twice since that second Super Bowl against the Patriots, they are back to being part of the underclass of the NFL, right there with the Jets.

Like both teams have turned into the New York Browns.

Over there at MetLife, the people in charge of the Giants have also convinced themselves that they’re just a quarterback away. Only they’re not, even after having Drew Lock finally give them a professional performance against the Colts, one that is as good as anything Rodgers offered Jets fans until he finally told the coach to send Tyrod Taylor into the game in Buffalo. And guess what? Jets fans have a right to wonder how differently things might have gone, especially in the middle of the season, if that had happened sooner.

“I need a break mentally,” Rodgers said the other day.

Jan. 2, 2025: Glad you had fun!

Goes double for all the Jets fans who desperately need a break with him.

Fans of loser teams always want to at least come away from a season like the one we’ve just witnessed thinking — hoping — that next season will be better. But how much better can Giants fans and Jets fans expect next season to be, especially without knowing who their quarterbacks are going to be in a quarterback league?

Can they things turn around? They can. Jets fans remember what it was like when the great Bill Parcells got to town after the Jets had fallen into a 1-15 ditch under Rich Kotite. Long before Tom Thibodeau got to the Garden, you know what happened with the Knicks when Dave Checketts convinced Pat Riley to come back to coaching. George Young became general manager of the Giants and began the process of changing Giants history, before he got with Parcells for as formidable a combination as any New York football team has ever had.

Now Leon Rose and Thibodeau have combined and we see a Knicks team that is balling as well as we had around here back in the 1990s, when the Knicks ended up in the NBA Finals twice.

The Giants, and their fans, want that feeling back. The Jets want them in the worst way, just because they so often have chased it in the worst way. For now, the pro football season mercifully ends, and not nearly soon enough. You even feel a little badly comparing the Jets and Giants to the circus because, really, what did the circus ever do to deserve that?

HEAT IS ON THE TEAM DOWN IN MIAMI, SADLY THE NBA IS 3-POINT CRAZY & WHAT A TALENT NABERS IS …

Who does Karl-Anthony Towns think he is — Juan Soto?

Thinking that Notre Dame, and Notre Dame fans, aren’t missing Brian Kelly so much.

Wait, none of this with the Rangers is on Chris Drury?

How does that work?

I’m frankly starting to worry about that vaunted Heat Culture down there in Miami.

One more thing about the Heat:

My pal Frankie Isola is right about Jimmy Butler:

To be “Playoff Jimmy” shouldn’t you have to win something?

So, losing to Michigan wasn’t the end of everything at Ohio State?

So many star Mets have left them, all the way back to George Thomas Seaver.

Some got traded and some left on their own.

But they left.

I don’t want to add Pete Alonso’s name to the list.

Let’s just say that a little bit of the shine has come off the SEC this season.

The Knicks might not be 3-point crazy, which is one of the reasons why they’re so much fun to watch.

But way too much of the league is 3-point crazy.

And isn’t fun to watch.

Not the only reason why ratings are down.

But please don’t try to tell me it isn’t one of them.

I’m all for college athletes getting paid, but does that mean they all get to sign one-year NIL deals forever, and pack up and leave after a couple of semesters if the wind changes?

Somebody has to explain to me how Oregon had to play Ohio State in the second round of the tournament and Penn State got to play Boise State.

Put me down as being somebody who wanted Saquon to break the record.

The playoffs would be a lot more fun with Joe Burrow and the Bengals in them.

Not sure, having watched both games, that the Packers getting behind the Vikings 28-0 in one and 27-10 in another was a blueprint for success.

The Jets bringing back Rodgers would feel like that “Murphy Brown” reboot a few years ago.

Wow, it sure was lucky the Jets were able to get Haason Reddick signed when they did.

All Malik Nabers did last Sunday was remind everybody how talented he is.

And now much of a baller he is.

There were a few throws that Michael Penix Jr. made against the Commanders last Monday night when he looked, at least a little bit, like a left-handed Jayden Daniels.

Who could have ever known that Nick Saban would get on television and say any damn thing that came into his head.

There must be baseball players, and famous ones, who wish they could have gotten the pass on PEDs that star tennis players seem to get.

If you haven’t yet purchased “A Town Without Time,” a collection from Gay Talese about New York that extends all the way back to the 1950s, do yourself a favor, because this is another treasure worth having from the great Mr. Talese.

Optimum vs. Dolan.

No way to root.

Across town we had Francisco Lindor having as exciting and dynamic a season as any Met has ever had, lifting his own game and his team at the end of May when it looked as if another Mets season was about to go up in smoke, taking the Mets all the way to the National League Championship Series, and giving the Dodgers, the eventual World Series champs, all they ever could have wanted across six games.

But neither one of them is the Sportsperson of the Year around here. Nor is Jalen Brunson, who also lifted his team, the Knicks, in a way no single player has since Patrick Ewing got to town from Georgetown. Brunson was a superb point guard in a point guard city, playing the position as well as the great Walt (Clyde) Frazier once did at the Garden, swishing and dishing and even ended ’24 with a flourish, putting a double nickel on the Wizards as the Knicks were finishing one of the best months they’ve had in ages.

They all made us watch and care this past year, but it doesn’t make them Sportsperson of the Year, because Juan Soto was. And is.

He came here to be the straw to stir the drink that Reggie Jackson once was for the Yankees and that is exactly what he became for the Yankees, even if he didn’t put them back on top in the end the way Reggie did back in 1977, when at the very end he beat the Dodgers in a World Series all by himself.

Soto and Judge were a team, for sure, the way Ruth and Gehrig were a team and then Maris and Mantle were in 1961. They made the Yankees dangerous again, because there was never a close game, the Yankees either ahead of behind, when you look ahead to when the two of them would be back at the plate in the late innings. Judge was once again the best home run hitter in the sport. But Soto looked like the best and most complete hitter anywhere, because of his power and his discipline and one of the sweetest swings you will ever see in this world.

Then, when the money was on the table in October and Judge was slumping, Soto stepped up all over again, getting 16 hits in 14 postseason games; having an on-base percentage of .478 and batting average of .368 in the league championship series and then a .522 on-base percentage and a .313 batting average in the World Series. All in, he was on base 30 times in the Yankees’ 14 postseason game. To the finish, he was everything he was advertised to be.

And when the season was over, he rang the bell one last time, in a different kind of Subway Series between Steve Cohen and Hal Steinbrenner, signing the biggest free agent contract in history to go across town and play for the Mets. From spring training all the way until he signed that deal, he was the biggest baseball story in town, because of the way he delivered once he got here and because of the constant speculation, building to his free agency, about whether he would stay with the Yankees or go play baseball someplace else.

He will never have Reggie’s swagger, or way with words. No one will ever describe him the way Graig Nettles once did with Reggie, Nettles saying that if reporters tried to pass Reggie’s locker without talking to him, Reggie would trip them. Doesn’t change the fact that Soto did become the straw that stirred the drink for the ’24 Yankees, without question, even in another MVP season for Judge; even with Lindor making his own MVP run with the Mets; even with the chants of “MVP” ringing in Jalen Brunson’s ears last spring.

Soto is the one who made the most news, start to finish, really without having to say a word, just by taking his place in front of Aaron Judge in Aaron Boone’s batting order. He was everything the Yankees could have expected from Opening Day in Houston on. And Yankee fans will always wonder what might have happened if the Yankees had forced a Game 6 in Los Angeles in the Series, just because Judge was starting to swing the bat again at the end.

Did others try to make as much news as Soto? You know another Aaron — Rodgers — sure did. But he was the one who mostly stirred the drink bad. Along the way, though, he sucked up so much oxygen that everybody else around the Jets must have occasionally found themselves gasping for breath. Or reaching for oxygen masks.

Rodgers was still a giant star here, but for all the wrong reasons. No, we had four stars who delivered the goods in such a rousing and entertaining way:

Judge.

Lindor.

Brunson.

Soto.

But none of the others were under as much pressure as Soto was, really from the time the Yankees traded for him. He was brought here to at least help get them back to the World Series for the first time since 2009. That is exactly what he did, on the great stage of Yankee Stadium, and under the big top of the big city. He delivered for Judge, hitting behind him. He delivered for the Yankees. And finally, after doing all that, he delivered for himself. Other guys had years. Not like his year. Everybody else had stakes. Not like his.

Then not only did he leave, he stayed. Even Reggie never pulled that off.

And to make the moment even a little more painful for local football fans, if such a thing is even possible at this point, Barkley that day will be running behind Mekhi Becton, whom the Jets took with the 11th pick of the 2020 draft, a player who has become one of the better right guards in the league for the Eagles this season.

And Darnold? He’s not going to win the MVP award this season, because Josh Allen ought to. If Allen somehow doesn’t, Lamar Jackson probably will win another one. But Allen’s team is 12-3 right now. Jackson’s team is 11-5. Darnold’s Vikings are 13-2 and still have their chance to finish with the best record in the NFC. When you look at that Vikings record and what they’ve done, it’s fair to ask how anybody has been more valuable to his team this season than Darnold — who only got his chance because rookie J.J. McCarthy got hurt — has been to the Vikings? That means whether he’s still with the Vikings next season or not, and no matter what happens against the Packers on Sunday.

It is why you can make the case, and fairly easily, that there aren’t two better stories in the whole league this season than the Barkley and Darnold. No. 2 and No. 3 from that ’18 draft. Both of them having become the stars the men who drafted them thought they could become.

Just somewhere other than here.

So one of the dreariest and dismal football seasons we have ever had in New York does get even more painful before the Giants and Jets are asked to stop playing football games. Because you can absolutely make the case that not only are Barkley and Darnold two of the very best stories in the league this season, but that they are two of the four most valuable players in the sport. Barkley of the Eagles. Darnold of the Vikings. Theirs, not ours.

By the way? You know who was the first overall pick in that ‘18 draft? Baker Mayfield. He’s somebody else who had to leave his original team — in his case the Browns, the Midwest version of the Giants and Jets — and make some other stops before finding his way to Tampa Bay.

Barkley had some times here, he did, before and after he hurt his knee. Dave Gettleman is the one who took a running back at No. 2, and talked at the time about being able to see Barkley wearing one of those gold sports jackets they give out in Canton to Hall of Fame players, though a lot of us gave him plenty of heat about that. A season like the one Barkley has had with the Eagles doesn’t mean that’s still going to happen for him, even if he is blessed with good health the rest of his career. But he has looked every inch a Hall of Fame talent in Philadelphia and, if Jalen Hurts hadn’t suffered a concussion last weekend, Barkley would be the biggest reason the Eagles might still be in play for best record in the conference.

He has been that great, and has occasionally looked that dominant. Just for the NFC East team less than a couple of hours from MetLife Stadium, at Lincoln Financial Field.

“I’ll have a tough time sleeping if Saquon goes to Philadelphia,” John Mara said, and famously on “Hard Knocks.”

Now there is a good chance that Mara’s nightmare about Barkley can play all the way out, in Philadelphia, with Mara perhaps having the chance, in person, to see Barkley break Dickerson’s record. You keep wondering what the bottom is for the 2024-25 Giants. Maybe that finally is: The possibility of Barkley doing it and doing it against the Giants. No one is quite sure what the Giants have done to have the football gods turn on them this way. But they sure must have done something.

And then there is Darnold sticking it to the Jets this way. Sam Darnold: Finally showing you what he can do now that he is with a real coach in Kevin O’Connell (who as a young quarterback once was filmed being cut by the Jets on “Hard Knocks,” all the way back in 2010). Darnold started to learn how to be a quarterback in the NFL when he was on Kyle Shanahan’s bench a year ago in San Francisco. Then he got with the Vikings and McCarthy got hurt and the rest is history, and what turned out to be history in a hurry for him and for the Vikings.

Darnold, so you know, doesn’t even turn 28 until next June, at this time when the Jets are trying to decide whether or not to bring back Aaron Rodgers, who will turn 42 about 49 weeks from now. The Jets gave up on Darnold and then they gave up on Zach Wilson and now, depending on what they decide, may be about to give up on Rodgers.

For sure, no one knows how everything will go for the Vikings the rest of the way. They are in the heavyweight division of pro football this season with the Lions and the Packers. They get the Packers before they get the Lions next Sunday, and so a lot can happen to them between now and their first playoff game.

But Sudden Sam Darnold has happened for them this season. Whatever happens from here, he has quarterbacked 15 games for his new team and won 13 of them, and has been the same kind of star for them that Saquon Barkley has been for the Eagles.

No. 2 in that draft. No. 3 in that draft. One going for a record. The other one still with a shot at best record in his conference. In a season when their former teams have combined to win six football games in total, and both seemed to have been eliminated from playoffs back around the autumn equinox.

How can the seasons get worse for the Giants and Jets? This is how. Saquon and Sam are. Nightmare. Just not for them.

BRING HIM BACK FOR PETE’S SAKE, GUMBEL WAS A BROADCASTING GREAT & HART NEEDS TO LIGHTEN UP …

Uncle Steve needs to bring back the bear.

Meaning Mr. Alonso.

The Polar Bear himself.

Somebody asked me the other day if the Knicks have ever had four different players capable of dropping 40 points on the other team, on any given night.

Well, as a matter of fact they have.

Willis had 40-plus games in his career, and so did Clyde.

So did Dave DeBusschere and Earl the Pearl.

The best Bill Bradley ever did in the pros was 38.

But, man oh man, did he ever score 58 one time for Princeton in a consolation game in the NCAA Tournament.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with Brian Daboll.

But what I do know that not only did he make it to the playoffs with Daniel Jones as his quarterback, the two of them even won that game against the Vikings once.

And that ain’t nothing, as bad as things have gotten since.

You know who’s still interested in Aaron Rodgers’ cockeyed theories about vaccines?

He is.

Greg Gumbel, who passed away the other day, was one of the most gifted and versatile broadcasters in the history of sports television, able to move effortlessly from studio work to play-by-play.

But more than that, he was one of the great gentlemen in the history of that business.

As much of a pleasure as it was watching him, it was much more of a pleasure to have known him.

Season 2 of “The Diplomat” was even better than Season 1, and that is saying plenty.

Not just because of Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell in the leads, but also because they brought Allison Janney out of the bullpen for the late innings to set up Season 3.

I feel at this point as if I’m up to speed on Juan Soto’s suite situation at Citi Field.

Gleyber Torres was once a cornerstone of another youth movement that never was for the Yankees.

Josh Hart is as much a glue guy as the Knicks have ever had.

But he could think about lightening up a little bit on people having noticed that Mikal Bridges got off to kind of a slow start before he turned things around.

Hart acts as if people want to run Bridges out of town.

Come on.

Wow, you know it was a big Christmas shot by Steph Curry at the end of Warriors vs. Lakers when Steph got a double “bang” out of Mike Breen.

“The Big Empty,” coming in January from my pal Robert Crais, is the best Elvis Cole-Joe Pike book he’s ever written.

And THAT is saying plenty.

There have been two truly great times for the Jets since Namath.

Bill Parcells was coach for one of them.

Rex Ryan was coach for the other, and he did it with Mark Sanchez.

Is the Seahawks-Bears game over yet?

I think I blacked out sometime during the third quarter.

Finally today:

A big-city shout-out to all those who still come to this place on Sundays, and still read our paper.

We’re still here.

And so are you.

Happy New Year.

We even just witnessed the biggest and most expensive big free agent game in New York sports history, between the Mets and Yankees over Juan Soto, who not only made the most money any free agent has ever made, but made it after just playing for the Yankees.

You look back on the year now and it’s as if there was big news just about every day, good and bad but never ever indifferent, just because nobody around here is ever indifferent about sports. And at least, and at long last, we had one team — the Liberty — get the kind of parade we talk about all the time around here and so rarely get.

This was the year of Aaron Judge and Soto turning into Ruth and Gehrig and Maris and Mantle. And if the Yankees didn’t give Yankee fans the ride they wanted up the Canyon of Heroes, they at least gave them one back to the World Series, a ride that really didn’t end until the top of the 5th of Game 5 against the Dodgers (almost called them “Rodgers” there, just out of force of habit), when the Dodgers came from 0-5 down and Judge dropped a ball in center that was the same as him dropping the season in that moment.

Right before that, the Mets had played the Dodgers a tougher and harder series than the Yankees would in the Series, in the National League Championship Series, going toe-to-toe with them for six games. Of course this was a Mets season that saw them at 22-33 at the end of May and then turn it around under a calm, gifted rookie manager named Carlos Mendoza, and become the best team in baseball from there until the end of the regular season. It was only one of the greatest turnarounds in all of Mets history, led by Francisco Lindor, who went to the leadoff spot at the end of May and produced from that spot the way Rickey Henderson, who would play for both New York baseball teams, once had.

“Even when we were struggling early, I always believed we had this in us,” Mendoza told me one day after the Mets had gotten going and going good.

He believed and they believed and so did Mets fans once again, because if you’re a Mets fan, you still gotta believe sometimes, don’t you? Now they have Soto in Queens instead of the Bronx. As soon as Steve Cohen made it happen, Mets fans wanted to start 2025 right now.

In football, it looks like the only thing either of our teams is going to win is the No. 1 overall pick in the draft the Giants are about to have for only the third time in their history, if they don’t make a mess of that the way they’ve mostly made a mess of just about everything else for the past decade, both on and off the field.

The Jets have remained interesting, just because of the way they keep losing games, and around Aaron Rodgers having become as epic a reality series as we’ve ever had for a star athlete around here. He was brought here to be a difference maker, brought here with the same kind of Hail Mary the Jets once threw at another aging Green Bay quarterback named Favre. Only now the Jets won’t even win as many games this season as they did last season when the quarterbacks were Zach Wilson and Trevor Siemian and Tim Boyle. And only once, truly did he do what we was brought here to do, despite all those chances, which means take the Jets down the field to win the game.

The big spotlight, this week and next week and until pitchers and catchers, is squarely on the Knicks, who are playing as if this might finally be the first time since 2000 when they can make it past the second round of the playoffs. But even though they couldn’t make it to the Eastern Conference finals last spring, couldn’t make it up to Boston, boy did Jalen Brunson and the other ‘Nova Knicks bring the Knicks back in the city in such a big and loud and pretty wonderful way.

Now Karl-Anthony Towns has joined up with Brunson and Josh Hart and a new ‘Nova Knick named Mikal Bridges and OG, because we need an OG in the year of OMG. Towns has already established himself as the second and full-fledged basketball star that Patrick Ewing never had back in the ’90s, the last time the Knicks mattered this way and this much; even as Towns is putting Ewing-like numbers into the books, almost on a nightly basis, scoring and rebounding and even giving us the night when he had 32 points and 20 rebounds against his old team from Minnesota.

Really then, the New Year has already started at Madison Square Garden, for the Knicks if not the hockey team whose name must not be mentioned. The Knicks are still a hot team to talk about. We keep talking about Hot Stove baseball as the Mets and Yankees keep making moves. From now until April, Giant fans will even be talking about Shedeur Sanders and Cam Ward. Always a lot to talk about here. Never more than in 2024. Ring out the old now, and not just old Aaron Rodgers. You know the rest. For now, Merry Christmas.

Rodgers held up his new No. 8 jersey that day, and no one could have dreamt that Rodgers and the Jets would find themselves where they are now, with the Jets trying to win as many games with him — seven — as Zach Wilson and Trevor Siemian and Tim Boyle did without him a year ago.

Here is one thing Rodgers said that day, April of ’23:

“Not every franchise is like the Jets. There are a few iconic franchises in the league, and when you win there, it’s different.”

He’s not right about a lot of things when he’s not throwing a football around, occasionally as well as he did last Sunday against a Jaguars team even worse than his own. But he was right on the money with the part about not every franchise being like the Jets, and not just in pro football, now that the Jets have gone longer than any team in pro sports in this country without making it to the playoffs.

The banner that ought to be flying over MetLife Stadium on Sunday before the Jets continue playing out the string against the Rams writes itself, as derivative as it would be:

“14 Years of Lousy Football is Enough….”

All athletes, especially star athletes, coming to new teams say what they think the fan base wants to hear. So you bet people ate it up when Rodgers looked at the one Lombardi Trophy the Jets have won and said it needed a friend. But the real money quote from the day he was introduced was the one that suggested the Jets are an iconic franchise, just because it should have been a laugh line to bring down the house that day.

By now everybody knows about an extraordinarily damning piece about the Jets owner, Woody Johnson, in The Athletic the other day, because at this point if there’s life on Mars, they know about the piece, too; about Johnson’s teenaged sons talking him out of a trade for Jerry Jeudy and all the rest of it.

A friend of mine, after reading it, and Johnson’s immense legacy of being the ridiculous figure that he is, sent me the following email:

“He’s worse than I thought.”

There’s even something in the piece about Johnson getting the last pick in the NFL draft because he was fixed on drafting Mr. Irrelevant. Only it wasn’t the player he drafted. It’s Woody himself.

It all comes out about Johnson at a point where he’s starting all over again yet again; about to hire a new general manager and a new coach. And he has to decide, less than a year-and-a-half after Rodgers was finally going to change everything for the Jets, if the Jets can run Rodgers out there in 2025, the season when he will turn 42 years old, because he really might give them their best chance at respectability.

This isn’t about Rodgers’ own and continuing diva-like silliness, which continued this past week when he was acting as thin-skinned as ever, still fixed on vaccines and beefs with ESPN personalities in his weekly appearance with McAfee, for whom Aaron Rodgers has been infinitely more productive, just in terms of the clicks he continues to generate, than he has been playing quarterback for the Jets.

This is about whether or not the Jets might be stuck with him and he might be stuck with them, which would be another kind of wonderful Jets things to have happened, just in light of all the bright promise and expectations — and all that Super Bowl chatter — from the spring of ’23.

Everybody gets why the Jets decided they had to go for him at the time, because of all the dominoes than started falling when they first drafted Sam Darnold at No. 3, gave up on Darnold, then turned around and drafted Wilson with the second pick in the draft. And because this is the Jets we’re talking about, absolutely, Darnold has already won one more game with the Vikings this season than the Jets have won the last two seasons combined. He’s 12-2. The Jets are 11-20.

Now the Jets are faced with the prospect that a quarterback who has never been the same after that Achilles injury — and of course it’s fair to wonder how this story would have turned out if Rodgers hadn’t gotten hurt in that opener against the Bills on Sept. 11 of ’23 — is worth rolling out there for another year, while the latest Crack Football Committee over there in Florham Park commences its own search for … wait for it … the next Joe Namath.

For most of this century, when it was the Knicks who were the NBA version of the Jets, it seemed laughable to keep calling Madison Square Garden a “mecca,” just because it had only become a mecca of bad management and bad basketball and truly awful ownership by James Dolan. That’s why it’s pretty amazing, in retrospect, for Rodgers to have described the Jets as being iconic seeing what they’ve become under Johnson since they last made the playoffs, a period in which he has been as bad an owner as we’ve ever had around here.

Over a half-century since the Jets played in, and won, their only Super Bowl. Fourteen years since they had a chance to go back. Rodgers now trying to win as many games as Wilson and Siemian and Boyle and them did. Another lost season playing itself out at MetLife Stadium.

You always hear there’s no “I” in team. With this team there is. Just not iconic. Irrelevant.

IT’S ALWAYS ABOUT THE MONEY, TIME TO FIX ADAM SILVER’S NBA & MERRY CHRISTMAS TO MY NEWS FAMILY …

We just found out on Saturday about the passing, far too soon and far too young, of Rickey Henderson, one of the great baseball players you will ever see, from the leadoff position or anywhere else.

Did I not tell you that the Yankee coverage would begin to tell you — and almost at warp speed — that somehow the Yankees would be better off without Juan Soto?

By the way?

When you hear what Soto said when he got to the Mets, and what Max Fried said the other day, you always go back to the wisdom from George Young:

When they say it’s not about the money, it’s always about the money.

Hey, if I were Garrett Wilson, I’d be wondering if I wanted to say a Jet, too?

Malik Nabers is probably thinking the same way.

And Nabers hasn’t even been here for a full season.

LeBron James is absolutely right:

The NBA has become the Hoist-Up-a-3 League, which is why the product becomes increasingly unappealing.

And why a very smart guy like Adam Silver has to know his product is getting weaker and not stronger, whatever he’s saying when he’s out front.

They came up with a tricked-up in-season tournament.

They keep trying to trick up the All-Star Game yet again.

I know, I know, the NBA is still rolling in TV dough with their new contracts.

But let’s see how the networks feel about their investment over the next few years if the ratings don’t get better than they are right now.

Tell you this:

I honestly believe they need to move back the 3-point line, even if that means the deep-corner shot is no longer in play.

Baseball found ways to make the game better.

Pro basketball can do the same.

Right now, this minute, if you give me a choice between a regular-season NBA game or a regular-season college game, I’m going college every single time.

If you haven’t yet seen the music video Chris Martin and 99-year-old Dick Van Dyke did together for Martin’s song, “All My Love,” do yourself a favor, because it’s pretty wonderful.

Finally today:

At the end of this last Sunday column before Christmas, I send out my best wishes and my admiration to all those who continue to put out the Daily News sports section, every day, with both passion and professionalism.

That means Kyle and Andy and Will the Back Page Guy and my Hall of Fame pal, Bill Madden; and everybody else with whom it is my high honor, after all my years at this paper, to work.

And I also send out best wishes and admiration to those with whom I no longer am privileged to work, like the great Delores Thompson, who was the boss of us all once, and Teri Thompson.

I had the great good fortune to work for a legendary editor like Ed Kosner at The News, and the great Jim Willse.

I will always miss Pete Hamill being down the hall, and Jimmy Breslin, and Michael O’Neill being on the other side of the city room, because Mr. O’Neill is the one who gave me a column here in the first place.

Every time I sit down to write a column, I imagine I’m still working with the late Bill Boyle, who always made me better when my work space was in the front of the newspaper after Pete and Jimmy were no longer there.

That’s just the short list of people who helped me along the way, and make me still want to do this work.

Not just do the work.

It’s more than that.

Do the work here.

Merry Christmas.

It is why the next NFL draft, next April, is as important as any other in the team’s long and occasionally storied history.

There have been other drafts that mattered, and a lot, for the Giants. There was the one that brought them Frank Gifford in the 1950s. There were two nearly three decades later, one where George Young drafted Phil Simms (1979) and another when he took Lawrence Taylor second overall (1981), big ones that helped put the Giants back on top for the first time since the ’50s.

And then there was the 2004 draft, the one that changed the history of this century for the Giants; the one where Ernie Accorsi made one of the greatest transactions in the history of New York sports, the draft day trade with the Chargers that won the Giants Eli Manning and eventually won them two Super Bowls, the first of which, against the 18-0 Patriots, John Mara called “the greatest victory in the history of this franchise.”

Now comes a season like this, one that makes Eli’s second Super Bowl team in Indianapolis, thirteen years ago this February, seem like it happened 100 years ago, when the Giants were still playing a New England team like the Providence Steam Roller. So now the question Mara has to ask himself is this:

Does he believe Joe Schoen is the right man to make the decisions to get the Giants out of this, and not just about who the next quarterback is going to be?

“It’s never just about getting yourself into position to make the pick,” Accorsi told me one time. “Then you have to decide whether there’s someone you truly believe can be a championship quarterback, which I believe with Eli after practically stalking him for two years. Of if there’s the kind of life changer that George [Young] was convinced LT was when George went for him.”

These are questions Giants have to answer over the next five months. Do Mara, and Schoen — if Schoen keeps his job — believe that Shedeur Sanders is a franchise-altering, or at least franchise-saving, quarterback? Do they think Cam Ward, the kid from Miami, can be the same thing? And if they don’t, if this is a draft that doesn’t have a Jayden Daniels, or a C.J. Stroud, up there at the top of everybody’s boards, do the people in charge of the Giants have the discipline, in light of everything that has happened over the past couple of seasons, to be sound with another kind of No. 1 pick, and all the picks that will follow?

I was talking to a league front-office executive on Wednesday, one without any skin in this particular game, who put it this way:

“No matter how you look at it, [John Mara] is in a brutal situation.”

He is, and he has to take his share of the blame for it, this brutal situation for him and his football team. Joe Schoen has clearly been no star as a personnel guy, or even close; honestly, he has been mediocre at best, and not just because he was part of the decision to give Daniel Jones that contract a couple of years ago because he won a single playoff game. Schoen’s best work, from football people to whom I’ve spoken, has been reshaping and restructuring the Giants front office. But if Mara blows him up, a lot of that gets blown up, and the Giants have to start all over again.

Again.

Schoen has been wrong about a lot. But this isn’t all his fault. Everyone associated with the Giants should have their heads examined for agreeing to give “Hard Knocks” the kind of access the show had, the way they were allowed to eavesdrop on therapy sessions with Schoen and Mara. But it was Mara who hired Dave Gettleman, and Ben McAdoo, and Pat Shurmur, and Joe Judge, the worst coaching hire the team has made since Ray Handley, Mara somehow convinced himself that in Judge he had found Bill Belichick on training wheels. Right before the wheels came off in Jersey again.

So here we are, and the only reason the Jets aren’t the biggest football joke over in the Meadowlands is because it’s Giants fans hiring those planes, and Giants fans — a legendary and passionate group for all times around here — showing up with paper bags on their heads. We keep hearing that the Giants at least are still showing some fight, as if that is where the bar is set now for a team that has won four Super Bowls over the past four decades, as if we’re now handing out participation trophies to the Giants now that the Lombardi Trophy is no longer in play, and hasn’t been for a long time.

Now 2025 is staring them in the face, as they play out the string in as dreary and depressing season as they’ve played all the way back to 1925. And when this season ends, the real season begins for management, everything that will happen once they finish out against the Eagles on Jan. 5.

John Mara will decide to keep Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll, or he won’t. But it needs to be for a better reason than him not wanting more change. It has to be because he sincerely believes they are the ones, the general manager especially, to get them out of this brutal situation.

But are they?

That doesn’t mean he just bought the Mets even one World Series by signing Juan Soto away from the Yankees. If you still think all it takes is money to buy happiness in sports, then take a look back at the days when the Yankees were money-whipping the baseball world, and how many World Series it brought them. Now sometimes money does buy happiness, and all you have to do is ask Dodgers fans about that. But not nearly as often as you think.

They’ve got deep pockets out there with the Guggenheim Baseball Management, who paid out a billion to Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto last winter. Just not as deep as Cohen’s, who’s got more money than any other owner in professional sports and just showed you, in lights and as loud as the big city, that he’s not afraid to spend it to get what he wants.

Hal Steinbrenner wasn’t afraid to make a bigger offer for Soto than anybody — including Hal himself — thought he would ever make, an offer more than twice what he paid Aaron Judge. This Steinbrenner just got beat. No shame, and look it up: There’s still a reason why they keep score in sports.

And it’s worth reminding everybody all over again that this is Cohen’s money. He didn’t come into the world as someone who, as the great-grandson of Robert Wood Johnson I, would eventually become one of the heirs to Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune the way Our Woody did. He wasn’t the son of Charles Dolan and son of Cablevision the way Jimmy Dolan is. Or inherit co-ownership of the Giants the way John Mara and Steve Tisch long since have.

You may not like the way Cohen came by his money, or that he once had to pay a fine of $1.8 billion because of insider trading. It’s still his, and he’s been spending it since he gave out his first big contract to Francisco Lindor, who became one of the most valuable players in the entire sport this past season, and did the most to carry the Mets all the way to the NLCS, and a tougher series against the Dodgers than the Yankees played in the World Series. Cohen wasn’t afraid to spend on Lindor, or Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander and he wasn’t afraid to cut his losses on Scherzer and Verlander in his own brand of a market correction. And now he isn’t afraid to hand out the biggest contract in the history of American team sports for Juan Soto.

From all published reports, Cohen thought almost until the end that he was going to lose Soto to the Yankees. Then he didn’t. He paid the most money and made all the right moves and now he wins Soto and the Yankees lose him and, yeah, because they still do keep score in sports, that’s what the scoreboard now says in New York, for everybody to see.

You are allowed to think it’s silly that the suite at Citi Field that Cohen threw in might have been one of the determining factors at the end, after the Yankees made it clear that they don’t do business with baseball players that way; think it silly just because of the money Cohen was already throwing in Soto’s direction. But what that showed is that Cohen, the hedge fund guy, might not have been hedging his bet on Soto, but sure was sweetening it.

Again: This is absolutely the kind of owner every sports fan wants, and everywhere. The Yankees were willing to overpay Soto to bring him back and put him back in front of Judge in their batting order. Then Cohen overpaid on top of their overpaying and now Soto will be hitting behind the great Lindor at Citi Field. Cohen threw in a suite on top of that. He and his wife, Alex, sold the Mets family as hard as they could. Maybe you think that shouldn’t have mattered either on a deal that will eventually go past $800 million when all is said and done. But if that had something to do with the Mets winning the day, well, that just means the Cohens were going to make sure they left it all on the field. So did Hal. In the end, Cohen had more “all” than the other guy did.

He does this, comes up as this kind of owner, at a time when the owners of the two football teams are as unpopular with their own fans as they have ever been, at any time in history. Johnson’s Jets are bad and the Giants are worse, at this point that feels like the lowest for them since they opened for business against the Providence Steam Roller in October of 1925. If this were Premier League football, the Giants at this point would be facing relegation.

This is first-generation money Cohen is throwing around, one hundred percent, same as Joe Tsai is doing in Brooklyn with the Nets. The Nets aren’t nearly where the Mets are right now. But they might be one of these days, and perhaps sooner rather than later. And Tsai’s New York Liberty just won a championship in the WNBA. None of this means that these rich guys are somehow more noble than the other owners in town. It just means that they both come to this having been on the line, and for a long time, Cohen in the world of hedge funds and Tsai with his Alibaba Group.

It is easier for Cohen to spend his money than the football guys and even the basketball owners, just because he can spend like it’s Fleet Week if he’s willing to pay a different kind of penalty in the form of baseball taxes. Now of course his head of baseball ops, David Stearns, has to figure out how to build a championship roster around Soto and his salary. It is a nice problem to have.

Mets fans are no longer conditioned — at least not for the moment, anyway — to believe that things are supposed to go wrong for them. Jets fans sure do. Giants fans still do. The Yankees are coming off a World Series, so it’s not as if Yankee fans are as mad at Hal as they were a year ago. The Knicks are headed in the right direction, but stay tuned with Jimmy D. if they don’t look like real championship contenders before this regular season comes to an end.

For now, though, Cohen is the big man in town. The way George was the guy once. You want to draw a line between them? There it is.

BILL WILL BE THE MAN AT UNC, OLE MISS CAN WHINE ABOUT TOURNEY FIELD & SILLY MONEY FOR FRIED …

I happen to believe that Bill Belichick is going to crush it in Chapel Hill.

Wondering if Aaron Rodgers would think the Jets are cursed if he had delivered in even half the games he had a chance to win in the fourth quarter this season.

Even for mid-December, that was a really bad loss for the Knicks the other night against Atlanta.

By the way?

Knick fans need to lighten up about Trae Young making his  mock throw of the dice at the end of that game.

Or act as if he planted the flag at midfield after the Michigan-Ohio State game.

I very much hope the Mets keep the Polar Bear around.

It wasn’t Alabama’s out-of-conference schedule that kept them out of the tournament.

It was losing to Vanderbilt IN-conference and then having the same thing happen when they got rolled by Oklahoma when the Tide was a 3-touchdown favorite.

Let’s face it, SMU getting in, at the end, was like them getting a participation trophy for putting up a good fight in the second half of the ACC title game against a 3-loss Clemson team.

But you know who belonged in more than either ‘Bama or SMU?

Ole Miss.

In so many ways, Max Fried’s contract, money-wise, is as ridiculous as Soto’s.

Soto was in the right place at the right time because he had the Yankees and Mets fighting over him.

And then Fried was in the right place at the right time when Steve Cohen won the Soto fight.

And so it goes.

How smart do the Royals look for signing Bobby Witt Jr. to that 11-year, $288 million contract?

Seriously? What do you think Boise State’s record would have been in the SEC?

I don’t know where Alex Bregman is going to end up, but he is one of the toughest and best ballers in the whole sport.

Say it again:

There has never been a costlier victory in history than Daniel Jones and the Giants beating the Vikings a couple of years ago.

Incidentally, it really would be one of the great ironies of all time if the Giants end up going after Jones’ new teammate, Sam Darnold, when this season is over.

Gee, after all the things Brian Cashman has said over the years about the Astros, why wouldn’t they want to make a big deal with the Yankees?

Quin Snyder is reminding everybody in Atlanta what a good NBA coach he is, and has been for a long time.

People keep saying, well, yeah, but Soto will be a DH in a few years.

David Ortiz was a DH.

How’d that work out for the Red Sox?

There are very few big deals the Yankees make at this time of year that don’t have them halfway to the Canyon of Heroes.

You know what we call the pitch that Devin Williams, the new Yankee closer, threw to Pete Alonso in the playoffs?

An Aroldis Chapman.

No big thing, but Aaron Rodgers has one more win at quarterback than I have since Halloween.

Strong in this case meant the guy at the table with the most money. Not the Yankee brand, whatever that even means anymore. Not the Yankees always having been the big brother to the Mets little one, with only two exceptions – 1969, 1986 – since the Mets came into existence. Cohen has more money than any other owner in American sports, even more than the people who own the Dodgers. And he was willing to spend whatever it took to get the guy he wanted. Once in baseball they said there was money, and then Yankee money.

Now it’s Cohen money. This is the way it was when Steve Ballmer, who was bidding with some other big, bad rich guys to get the Los Angeles Clippers. Ballmer wanted the team. He finally threw down two billion dollars and said that everybody else could call off the contest line. It was his money. Now it’s Cohen’s. He might be a pirate. But he’s the Mets’ pirate. He wins here. The Yankees lose. You start and end there, because where else would you? We’ve known for a long time that the Yankees can no longer bully the rest of baseball, not the way they used to when they were the ones out-spending the world. But what became official on Sunday night is that their brand no longer wins the day, certainly not at these prices.

And by the way? Hal Steinbrenner left it all on the field here, he did, no matter how much hang-wringing there is from fans of his team today. He was willing to offer Soto twice – TWICE – what he just paid Aaron Judge, the greatest Yankee home run hitter since Babe Ruth; twice the $360 million that Steinbrenner paid the guy who has become the face of the Yankees the way Derek Jeter was before him. I don’t think that Hal thought when this all began that he would end up offering more than $700 million, which is where I was always sure this thing was going to land. He did. Cohen was swinging the biggest wallet here, and the biggest wallet won, something he showed by essentially going past $800 million everybody stopped counting.

Scott Boras, Soto’s agent, wanted to break a record, and did, same as he did when Alex Rodriguez got $252 million to sign with the Texas Rangers. He got Soto more than Shohei Ohtani got in total value from the Dodgers, more than any athlete in the history of team sports has ever gotten. The difference in the final bids wasn’t going to affect a single day of the rest of Soto’s life, obviously. But that’s not the way Boras keeps score, and never has been.
When John Henry and Tom Werner and the late Larry Lucchino got the Red Sox over 20 years ago it was Lucchino, a truly great baseball man and visionary, who understood that you can’t win the past from the Yankees, because nobody can. But Lucchino’s mission statement was simple and basic enough: We’re going to start a new fight with the Yankees, one that starts now, let’s go. And since the Red Sox did start that fight, they have won four World Series and the Yankees have won one. Yankees won the last baseball century? Just in terms of the Series, the Red Sox are winning this one.

Steve Cohen wants that. He wants to win the battle for Baseball New York, of course, he’s made that clear from the start. More than that, he wants what the Red Sox have had over the first quarter of this century. And if you really are surprised that he is running the Mets in the same hardball fashion he’s run his hedge funds, than you haven’t been paying close enough attention.
This isn’t about how this would have played out when George Steinbrenner were still at the top of his voice  – are we really still trope-ing our way there? – and his own wallet-swinging game. Even he wouldn’t have been able to out-spend Steve Cohen if it came down to that. It’s why this really is more about the guy who won Soto than the guy who lost him. Steve Cohen got what he wanted, and who he wanted. Now we see how Hal Steinbrenner – and Brian Cashman – respond.

The Yankees didn’t go after Bryce Harper when they had a shot at Harper, when Harper would have been a perfect fit for the Yankees and for Yankee Stadium; when he was a free agent about the same age as Soto is now. It was a monumentally bad business decision, whatever the financial considerations were at the time. Now, with Soto on the other side of town — and turning the Yankees into the Other Team in town in this case — it is up to Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman to respond. In Cashman’s case, and in the words of the great George Young, it’s time for the guy Hal clearly thinks is some kind of guru to start guru-ing.
This isn’t about what the Soto contract will look like down the road. This is about how much it’s worth to Cohen now, to his own brand, his own ego, and his own ambition. This past season, the Mets’ record against the Yankees was 4-0. Make that 5-0.