In the history of pro football, at least the history that begins with the NFL-AFL merger, there has been only one time when you could say that either the Giants or Jets had the best quarterback in all the land. That was in the prime of Joe Namath, which frankly didn’t last very long. But while it did, he was the first quarterback to pass for 4,000 yards and the first AFL quarterback to win a Super Bowl, Super Bowl III, of which Jets fans maybe have heard.
Put it another way: Since the merger, and in a world where we are told constantly that quarterback is the most important position in sports — mostly because it is — New York has seen two Hall of Fame quarterbacks (at least until Eli Manning makes it, which I believe he should, we can argue about that later), Namath and Fran Tarkenton. And Tarkenton will always have been more Minnesota than New York, by a country mile.
Now, as we approach another New York football season, we do have a future Hall of Famer in Mr. Fun, Aaron Rodgers, about to finally quarterback the Jets. We have Daniel Jones about to get another shot, perhaps his last shot, quarterbacking the Giants. And the fact of things, for Rodgers as much as for Jones, is that we aren’t looking for anything resembling Hall of Fame performances from either one of them. Fans of the Jets and fans of the Giants are just looking for these three things:
They are looking for good health, they are looking for competency, they are looking for production. Anything more than that, including from the 40-year-old Rodgers, will be a bonus. And if the Giants get all three from Jones, it will feel as if John Mara and Steve Tisch and Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll have pulled winning lottery tickets. There is even the shot — if a long shot — that if Jones posts up for all 17 regular season games, the Giants might remember how to win more games than they lose.
But here is another fact of things, less than a month out from the start of the regular season: The Giants have as much riding on Jones as the Jets do on Rodgers, who is supposed to end a playoff drought for his team that happens to be the longest in the league. The Jets, as everybody knows, are about to pin their hopes and dreams on Rodgers for just a second season. The Giants are about to invest a sixth in Jones, even though they still don’t know whether or not he is the second coming of Dave Brown, another first round pick (top pick in the 1992 NFL Supplemental Draft) out of Duke who never became what his general manager — the great George Young — thought he was going to be.
By the way? The Giants finally gave up on Brown after his sixth season with the team.
So that’s where we are with the current combination of New York quarterbacks. One guy, the famous guy, will turn 41 in December if he’s still standing, and is coming off an Achilles injury that might have him bubble-wrapped until Opening Night for the Jets against the 49ers. Rodgers didn’t last one game for the Jets last season. Jones lasted six games for the Giants, and wasn’t much to look at during any of them. His best year for touchdown passes is still his rookie year, when he threw 24. He hasn’t come close to that since. Even in the best time for him, two years ago, when he won that playoff game against the Vikings and got himself good and paid by the Giants, he threw 15 touchdown passes in 16 regular-season games.
Eighteen NFL quarterbacks threw for more that season. Andy Dalton, with the Saints that year, threw for 18. In a passing league. In a quarterback world.
The Giants and Jets, since Namath, have never had a Top 5 quarterback, at least not for more than a blink. You bet the Giants won with Phil Simms, who might be in the Hall if he hadn’t got hurt when Bill Parcells’ Giants were on their way to a second Super Bowl, one in which they beat the Bills with Jeff Hostetler at quarterback. Eli, of course, had a long and distinguished career and ended up winning one more Super Bowl than Rodgers managed to win with the Packers. Not only did he win two Super Bowls, he won them off Bill Belichick and Tom Brady and the first one Super Bowl XLII, when the Patriots were 18-0, was the single greatest moment in all the 100 years of the New York football Giants.
The Jets have had their QB1 moments, too. They have. There was the year, when Parcells was coaching the Jets, when Vinny Testaverde had the season of his life, throwing 29 touchdown passes against just seven interceptions, having a 12-1 record as Parcells’ starter, and going all the way to the AFC championship game against John Elway and the Broncos.
A decade or so later, they had Mark Sanchez, who was competent and productive enough — the nicest way to describe The Sanchize — to take Rex Ryan’s Jets to two straight AFC championship games. In the second one, against the Steelers at old Heinz Field, the Jets scared the Steelers about half to death, and nearly did make it back to the Super Bowl for the first time since J.W. Namath.
Now here we are. We know about all the expectations for Rodgers. But as great as he has been, and knowing that he threw for 48 touchdown passes just four years ago, there is as much uncertainty about what he can actually do this season as there is about Jones, who brings hardly any expectations into the season. This is true even for all Jets fans who get all weak at the knees every time he makes a few good throws on the practice field.
Can Rodgers come close to being the elite New York quarterback that he was in Green Bay? Maybe he can. Maybe he really can be the kind of over-40 quarterback that Tom Brady was. Can Jones, with a thrilling talent like Malik Nabers on his side, be the kind of two-way guy that he was when he did win that one playoff game, and on the road, against the Vikings? We’re about to find that out if he stays healthy, the way we’re about to find out how much game Rodgers still has if he can stay healthy for the Jets.
We will start getting answers to all our questions in a few weeks. That’s when the pro football season starts. Rodgers of the Jets. Jones of the Giants. And maybe here’s the best question of all:
Will either one of these guys be around here in a year?
NEED TO MAKE THINGS RIGHT FOR CHILES, STEPH WITH THE MOMENT OF THE OLYMPICS & CAN CLAY BE TRUSTED?
No city has ever done a better job of staging the Olympics, summer or winter, then Paris just did.
Speaking of the Olympics:
There is the letter of the law in sports, and there is the spirit of the law.
And the spirit of the law, one hundred percent, is that Jordan Chiles should get the bronze medal that she thought she won in women’s gymnastics.
The idea that the Court of Arbitration for Sport took the medal away because it says that Chiles’ coach was four seconds late filing an inquiry about the scoring that day is not just wrong-headed, and breathtakingly arrogant.
It’s a full-fledged Olympic scandal, ruining the crowning achievement after a lifetime of training for this young woman for no good reason.
Shame on the Court of Arbitration for this ruling.
And shame on the United States Olympic Committee if it doesn’t take whatever means it can to make things right for Ms. Chiles.
One more thing about the two-plus weeks of Olympic sports we just witnessed in Paris:
Those four 3-pointers that Steph Curry made against France in the gold medal game was the single best moment of long-distance clutch shooting a big basketball game has ever seen.
Those shots were everything that Steph has always been on a basketball court, all the way back to when he nearly shot an under-manned Davidson team to the Elite Eight, and everything he still is.
There are all the other shooters we’ve ever seen, and then there’s him.
So many other Olympic moments for this country, from Simone to Katie Ledecky to our sprinters, both men and women.
But Steph’s was the best one of them all.
Are Yankee fans really going to trust Clay Holmes in October?
At this point, LIV Golf is like the Lost City of Atlantis of golf tours.
It is worth mentioning again that in the past decade the Giants and Jets have won a combined total of one playoff game.
One.
Imagine where the Yankees would be without Soto.
OK, raise a hand if you knew that coming into the weekend these were the next three RBI leaders after Mr. Judge:
Jose Ramirez.
Marcell Ozuna.
Bobby Witt Jr.
Put me down as somebody who can’t wait to see what Coach Cal is going to do at Arkansas.
Maybe he gets the kind of last act there Rick Pitino is looking for at St. John’s.
Remember when Gleyber Torres and Clint Frazier and Miguel Andujar were practically going to rule the world?
What’s the over-under number on points for Jayson Tatum this season when he goes up against Steve Kerr’s Warriors?
The Mets knew those games against the A’s counted, right?
I was listening to some of the commentary on Hasson Reddick this week and couldn’t decide whether he wanted a new contract, or had slashed the tires on Woody Johnson’s car.
J.V. Vance — oops, J.D. Vance — is turning out to be like the Zach Wilson of draft choices.
“Hard to Kill,” the new Jane Smith thriller from James Patterson and Mike Lupica, was in the Top 5 again this week on both the New York Times and Publishers Weekly Best Seller lists.
