The fate of 2 franchises

There are all sorts of fun and interesting places to start with the first round of this NFL draft, but here is one as good as any in Football New York: I think Dave Gettleman, the new Giants general manager, the front office equivalent of a career gym rat, is a perfect, tough, no-nonsense guy for this point in Giants history. It is, by the way, a point in their history where they have once again hit the skids, and have started to make their last Super Bowl feel as if Simms and Taylor played in it.

I think Gettleman is sincere when he says he loves Saquon Barkley as much as Ernie Accorsi was head-over-heels in love with Eli Manning once. Okay to all that. But I also think Gettleman should have taken a quarterback instead of a running back, as gifted as this particular running back is; and that he just let a franchise quarterback go to the team that plays in his own building. Gettleman says he doesn’t care what the Jets do, or words to that effect. Well, he ought to. You think our baseball teams don’t watch what the other is doing? Come on.

Gettleman got a total star in Barkley, you bet he did, the way Jerry Reese got this kind of star with Odell Beckham Jr. But as great as Barkley is, and he was great at Penn State, you have to tell me which total star, highdraft-pick running back ever carried his team to a Super Bowl. Everybody thought Ezekiel Elliott was going to do that with the Cowboys. Let’s see when he plays in the big game if Dak Prescott doesn’t turn out to be a star quarterback (which, by the way, I’m not sure he is).

Everybody talks about the great Emmitt Smith. How many Super Bowls would he have won, or even played in, without Troy Aikman? Say it again: Ernie was in love with a quarterback who he thought would win Super Bowls for the Giants, and then did win Super Bowls. Twice. To compare a running back with a quarterback in this league, at this time, simply doesn’t track, no matter how just about everybody in town — with the notable exception of Manish Mehta of the Daily News — has thrown down and thrown in with this pick, as if the earth would have stopped spinning on its axis if the Giants had taken Saquon Barkley of Penn State.

If somebody at the Giants wants to tell me that Davis Webb is their hands-down quarterback of the future, well, let somebody from the Giants say that. But the idea that you can’t take a quarterback like Darnold, or Baker Mayfield, or any of the other quarterbacks taken in the first round of this draft, if you’re not completely certain that they will punch a ticket to Canton someday is just more folly. Gettleman said that with a pick this high, you have to see the player wearing one of those yellow blazers at Canton someday. With all due respect to the Giants GM, who passed that rule?

Now we hear that Eli Manning is slinging and flinging, as Clyde Frazier might say, the way he did when he was at his best happens to be just plain ridiculous. If Eli is what he was five or six years ago, then somebody needs to explain to me how the Giants didn’t win another Super Bowl even two years ago when Eli was two years younger and they dominated the key statistics in team defense. Eli’s play was backed by that kind of defense in 2016. He had Beckham, the king of the high seas. And the Giants went into Lambeau and got smacked around by Aaron Rodgers, who WAS at the top of his game, in the first round of the playoffs. Ernie Accorsi was saying not long ago that if quarterback is the most important position in sports, then backup quarterback has become the second most important position. We saw it with the Vikings last season, we sure saw it with Nick Foles and the Eagles after Carson Wentz got hurt. I get that Eli doesn’t miss a start unless Ben McAdoo misses it for him. People in outer space can see what happened in front of Eli these past few years. And I get that he now gets with someone — Barkley – who could turn out to be a transformative talent.

But there is suddenly the idea that Barkley changes everything with Eli and all of the Giants, as if somehow they’re just one skill position player away from a return to glory. There seems to be this attendant idea that you can get a quarterback anytime you want one, even though the Giants didn’t find themselves in this sort of draft situation since Eli. Again and again:

The Giants didn’t just draft Barkley in the first round on Thursday night, they drafted a 37-year old quarterback right along with him, as if they had two picks out of the first four the way the Cleveland Browns did.

Might he turn out to be a running/catching version of Michael Jordan? Barkley might turn out to be that, and maybe in a few years, if he and Eli are holding up the Lombardi Trophy, the idea that anybody thought that Gettleman shouldn’t have taken him second will seem plain nuts. For now, as splashy as the pick was, it was probably the safest in the entire first round of the NFL draft. Ernie loved Eli and bet the Giants’ future — and his own — on him and Eli was the one who became a transformative player in Jersey, and won the Giants two Super Bowls, both against the Patriots.

Now the guy who has the job that Ernie had has bet the future on a running back, even though somebody has to tell me the last time a running back drafted this high in an NFL draft carried his team to a Super Bowl. It is part of football lore that the Steelers, a million years ago, cut Johnny Unitas and then didn’t draft Lenny Moore out of Penn State. But which do you think was the bigger mistake?

The bottom line here, if there even is such a thing as a bottom line when you’re talking about draft choices before any of them have played a game that counts, is this, at least to me: Gettleman and the Giants could turn out to be absolutely right about Saquon Barkley. But if the Jets turn out to be just as right about the kid they just drafted at quarterback, then the Giants are wrong.