It is always
Football season around here, the same way it’s always
baseball season. And it feels that way more than ever these days, even in the spring, because of free agency and the upcoming draft. So, you better believe the Giants and Jets are very much in the conversation lately, one that can start here as well as anywhere else, whether the Giants like it or not: They’re no better than the Jets now. And they might turn out to be worse if a quarterback older than the East River and coming off a torn Achilles — Mr. Rodgers himself, now playing in our neighborhood — manages to stay healthy for the 2024-25 NFL season. Stay with the Giants for now. You know how much went wrong for them last season, starting with their opening drive of the season against the Cowboys, one that ended with a blocked field goal being returned for a touchdown , in a game that ended 40-0 for Dallas. But even with everything that did go wrong from there, including a three-game stretch where a third-string quarterback named Tommy DeVito actually ended up looking like some sort of savior, they were still lucky in this way: They had the Jets being about as much the Jets as they could ever be after Rodgers went down four plays into the season , one night after it had been Cowboys 40 and Giants 0 at MetLife Stadium. They had all of Rodgers’ silly controversies after that; had the worst quarterback play in the league and the worst in memory for a
New York football team; had Butt-Fumble-ugly losses to the Falcons and the Raiders and ultimately only got a game against the Giants when the Giants managed to look like even more of a clown show than the Gang Green guys did. And, of course, Rodgers kept acting as if he were going to shock the world and come down the chimney at MetLife as if he were Santa Claus, just in green. The Jets finally ended up losing 10 games and it felt like more than that, to the point where the most interesting part of the season would be on Tuesdays when Rodgers would go on television with his pal Pat McAfee and act as if he was never going to shut up. Because of the expectations that Rodgers had brought with him from Green Bay, and all the crazy Super-Bowl-or-bust talk, it really did make a 7-10 season feel as sad and dreary as 1-15 had once under Rich Kotite. At the same time, and coming off their first playoff win in years, the Giants were an even worse football team. And would have heard it even worse from their fans and from the media if the Jets hadn’t kept slipping on banana peels with Zach Wilson and everybody else who ended up behind center after Robert Saleh eventually couldn’t bear watching him any longer. Once again, despite all the high expectations both teams had brought into the season, both our teams looked like part of the underclass in the National Football League. They were the same, our teams. They have been the same for a long time, even if the Big Blue remain a blue-blood franchise for pro football and the Jets are anything but. In the past 10 seasons, the Giants are 60-102-1. The Jets are 55-108. The Giants are 1-1 in the postseason, the Jets haven’t made the postseason since Rex Ryan was still coaching the team. Suddenly, though, after the Jets became a laughingstock all over again, they are the ones with prospects if Rodgers can stay healthy, as much as that is no sure thing. They are loaded on both sides of the ball, Rodgers will have weapons all over the place if he doesn’t hold on to the ball too long, they have one of the best defenses in the league. It is different for the Giants, way different, as much as they believe they have been improved by free agency, if not as much as the Jets have. Not only do they have a quarterback coming back from serious injury with Daniel Jones , their quarterback has a history of injury in a very short career. The Giants have now waited five years waiting for him to be the player former general manager Dave Gettleman thought he was going to be when he drafted him out of Duke with the No. 6 pick in the draft. It is why most Giants fans I know want their team to find a way for them to draft another quarterback this year, no matter how much money they paid Jones because he won that one postseason game against the Vikings. That was right before the Giants played the Eagles the next week and made the Eagles look like a varsity team scrimmaging against the JV’s. Again: The Giants have turned into the Jets, as much as it must pain the people in charge to read or hear or even think that. And it is the Jets who have excited their fan base, who have gotten their fans to dreaming all over again about what the season can be like if their No. 8 — Darkness Retreat Aaron — manages to finally bring them back into the light for the first time since Rex. We thought the Giants had stopped doing Jets things — hey there, Ben McAdoo and Joe Judge; hey there, Gettleman — when they brought in Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll to run the football operation. Then they went 9-7-1 and made it out of the regular season for the first time since they won their last
Super Bowl over the Patriots in Indy. Daboll was Coach of the Year, Jones got that new contract, Saquon Barkley was back to looking like the best player on the team. Now, just that quickly, Barkley is gone and they are coming up fast on another reckoning, facing a season when it will be their
Job to convince their own passionate fan base that things aren’t flying apart, and in all directions, all over again. They enter another season when they are hoping against hope that not only can Jones stay healthy, but can convince the fans that the only reason their team is staying with him is because of the money they’ve got invested in him, and sheer stubbornness. You know how it was last year. The level of anticipation and excitement — for both teams — was as high as it had ever been. Jets had Rodgers. Giants had made it back to the playoffs. Then the Giants were 6-11 and the Jets were 7-10 and both came crashing to earth. The excitement is still there for Jets fans, as they once again see their team build everything around a quarterback who will turn 41 the first week in December. Giant fans? They’re scared half to death that things might get worse — again — before they get better, just without the laughs we’ve come to expect from the Jets. One winning season for the Jets in the past 10 years. Two for the Giants. Maybe next year will be different. The first rock star of a women’s
basketball player I saw in person and wrote about was Cheryl Miller, back at the 1984 Summer Games in
Los Angeles, when she was almost as big an attraction there as Michael Jordan was for the men. Now, all this time later, and with so many great players who came after Reggie’s sister, we have Caitlin Clark, who has become for this one season the biggest star the women’s side of college basketball has ever seen. And what I sort of don’t need is for anybody else to explain what I’m seeing from Ms. Clark, or what she’s meant to her sport, or how the media has gone overboard praising her. Yeah……no. This isn’t about race, or lack of context, or lack of historical perspective. It’s about knowing what we’re all seeing. I don’t care whether you think she’s the GOAT or not. No one has ever had a season like this. No one has ever brought more people into the tent. If you can’t appreciate that, or understand that, go bowling. I wish I could hit my 4-iron off the ground the way Pete Alonso golfed that ball out of Citi Field in the bottom of the 9th the other day. When Uncle Steve said the Mets were going to surprise us this season, did he mean by them losing 100 games? There was so much Jimmy V. talk the past week or so, because of the run North Carolina State made to the Final Four. And it got me remembering what it was like being with him in Albuquerque in 1983, when his NC State team basically invented Cinderella for the modern version of March Madness. He’d given his Sunday press conference and I was walking with him to his car, and he finally said, “They keep telling me I don’t have a chance. Let me ask you something: Kentucky got a chance? UCLA got a chance? Carolina got a chance? There’s only two teams left. I gotta have some kind of chance.” He stopped then, and grinned, as if he were going to live forever. “It’s why I brought two suits,” Jimmy Valvano said. If everybody misses Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka so much, how come nobody watches them on TV? Finally today: Happy birthday to our youngest son, Zach. He’s always been the glue guy in our family. Now he’s known that way on
Instagram. Go find him if you haven’t already (@glue.guy). It’s where the cool kids hang to talk about sports.