Having given fans what they wanted, Mara, Tisch now must make right calls

THE pound of flesh has been delivered, as demanded. The hapless and hopeless general manager has been exiled. The overmatched head coach has been fired. The masses have their red meat, and they can delight in devouring that in the moment, savoring it, gulping it. That was the easy part.

Now comes the hard part.

Now comes the part where John Mara and Steve Tisch have to embark on their finest hour as the co-owners of the Giants. It can go no other way. The next few weeks must yield a general manager with vision and a coach to implement that foresight. The coming months must produce a bountiful draft and an offseason acquisition strategy that builds a competent and strong foundation.

“I said before the season started that I wanted to feel good about the direction we were headed when we played our last game of the season,” Mara said in a statement released by the team. “Unfortunately, I cannot make that statement, which is why we have made this decision. We will hire a general manager and that person will lead the effort to hire a new head coach.”

It is clear that the Giants’ late-season transformation from a standard lousy football team to a league-wide embarrassment played at least a part in the owners’ thinking, as it should have. Gettleman was a goner anyway once the team started out 0-3 and 1-5 and 3-7. Judge was a harder call.

He was a young coach who had actually shown promise as a rookie. He was a branch of the Bill Belichick Coaching Tree, which doesn’t exactly have a history of prosperity but Belichick’s is one of the revered names around the Giants offices. And for a team that hates to be looked at as a revolving door of instability, firing a third straight coach (after Ben McAdoo and Pat Shurmur) after two years on the job was a dyspeptic option.

2022 John Mara will never be confused with 1982 George Steinbrenner, after all.

But Judge gave him and Tisch little choice in the matter, and his 11-minute filibuster after the Giants got their doors blown off in Week 17 in Chicago only made that more clear. The franchise had become a laughingstock everywhere else but in New York — where the fans were red-cheeked with fury.

So Mara and Tisch swung the ax. If that is acting against type, good: That is what we need to see more of. We have already seen that the owners are committed to doing what everyone in the NFL has been screaming that they must: Look outside the campus at 1925 Giants Drive, look to other successful operations, open the door to fresh voices and perspectives.

The names that started appearing in the past two days — among them Joe Schoen from Buffalo, Ryan Poles from Kansas City, Adam Peters and Ran Carthon from San Francisco, among several others — were a first progressive signal that they understood what they had to do, where they had to go. It was clear that Giants’ executive Kevin Abrams was not going to be part of the process, another sign.

And once they committed to this, it was only a matter of time.

Now comes the hard part. Now comes the hard work. The Mara-Tisch partnership has produced two Lombardi Trophies that offer proof in the lobby of team headquarters that they are a functioning duo. If Jerry Reese fell out of favor later during his tenure as GM, he was the first shared decision the two men made back in 2006 — along with retaining Tom Coughlin — and each member of Reese’s first draft class played on the 2007 champions.

That the cast of pedestrian choices they’ve made since — Gettleman, McAdoo, Shurmur, Judge — have been cataclysmic doesn’t take those trophies away, doesn’t erase from the record books what the Giants did. They get their mulligan now. They get their doover. They have to get this right, in the same way Wellington and Tim Mara finally got it right on Valentine’s Day 1979, the day George Young — family outsider — became the GM during another period of football famine.

It was every bit as hard for John Mara’s old man and his cousin to make that choice as it was for he and his partner, Tisch, to make this one. The Giants were reborn in 1979, and champions within seven years — but only because they picked the right guy, Young, who picked the right coach, Bill Parcells, and ultimately picked an awful lot of good players.

That was the hard part. The Maras got that part right back in the day. Fortythree years later, it’s on John Mara and Steve Tisch to channel that old pathway. They’re on the clock now. And the whole league is watching.

Getty Images THEY’VE DONE IT BEFORE: Co-owners John Mara (left) and Steve Tisch have blown a series of recent hirings, but they got it right when they made Jerry Reese the GM in 2006 — and won the Super Bowl (above) a year later.