MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — In the nearly silent loser’s locker room yesterday at Sun Life Stadium only one word was heard and it echoed from every corner. It was heard so often that after a while it felt like the Patriots were sitting in the Alps, not near the beach as the word “better” echoed through the hills.

Got to play better.

Got to get better.

Got to do better.

For the truth tellers among them, which were few, it was “we better get better.”

The only thing missing was the hard truth. The truth that the noted former NBA philosopher Micheal Ray Richardson made famous when saying of one of his troubled teams: “The ship be sinking.”

Better believe it.

The Patriots are in the playoffs but they are also in trouble. They have lost four of their last six games, which is no way to enter the postseason, and they are battered and beaten down. They are tired, they are aching and they have too many guys who need to get better to believe too strongly that better days are coming soon.

Conventional wisdom back in New England is that the ship will be righted by the return of the limping and the lame. Wait until Julian Edelman comes back from his broken foot and Sebastian Vollmer’s ankle heals, the loyal flock says. But they said that about the returns of Danny Amendola and Rob Gronkowski and yesterday, they caught four passes for 35 yards between them and Gronk didn’t have a catch until the fourth quarter.

Injured players may come back from their ills but are they the same players they were before they limped off? In most cases, they are not. There is a toll exacted for every strained ligament and broken bone. There is a price paid for every sprained ankle and concussed brain. You may come back and play before the season ends, but are you the same?

Most often you are not and so your team becomes less than what it was. That’s the harsh truth of getting to the Super Bowl — usually it’s the teams who have best survived a 17-week torture chamber, not necessarily the ones that were the best on Labor Day. Yesterday it was obvious one of those teams is no longer the Patriots.

Even the normally stoic Tom Brady, when asked how he felt after the 20-10 loss to the lowly Miami Dolphins, said only “Sore.” He looked every bit his 38 years as he limped away, head down, after adding, “We have to get better. This will give us the chance to evaluate where we’re at and see the things we need to do better as a team so we can try to win these games.

“We’re trying to be effective and move the ball down the field and score points but we’re just not doing a very good job of it. That’s what it comes down to. We’re just not doing enough on offense to be productive.”

The present form of the Patriots has scored one offensive touchdown or fewer in the second half in six of its last seven games. And the past two weeks the team is 5-of-24 on third down, a dismal conversion rate of 20.8 percent on football’s most crucial down. One more performance like that and there won’t be another until September.

Worse, with all but two of their normal defensive starters on the field facing a lethargic Dolphins team playing out the string of a season that has already seen three coaches and the general manager fired, the Patriots allowed six pass completions of 22 yards or longer and four of 29 yards or longer in a 20-10 loss.

This was supposed to be a blossoming “shut-down defense” but it couldn’t shut down an offense ranked 27th in the league in both yardage gained and points scored. That offense piled up 438 yards and converted on 47 percent of its third down attempts. That’s over 100 yards more than the norm for the dour Dolphins and, unlike the Pats offense, there were few injuries to blame the defensive lapses on.

Yes, Chandler Jones and Dont’a Hightower were out but the bulk of the defense was intact, including its secondary, which returned safeties Devin McCourty and Patrick Chung and still got lacerated by Ryan Tannehill. That’s the same Tannehill who inspired Miko Grimes, wife of Tannehill’s teammate Brent Grimes, to tweet recently: “I knew this qb stunk the minute we signed to this team but I tried to keep quiet so I didn’t discourage bae from believing in his team,” and “My Column: how many people does Ryan Tannehill have to get fired before you realize he’s the problem?”

The Patriots’ secondary and non-existent pass rush turned Tannehill into a problem they could not solve, allowing him to pass for 350 yards and two scores, scramble for a 19-yard run and put up a 112.8 quarterback efficiency rating. It was enough to make Miko Grimes smile.

It was not enough to make Bill Belichick smile, though. He grunted his way through a brief postgame press conference in which the term “guttural” came to mind with each of his less-than-enlightening responses.

Asked about the odorous play of his patchwork offensive line, which was without both starting tackles and played like it was also without its starting center and two starting guards, he grunted, “I just said I don’t think we did anything well enough today, so that includes everything.”

That apparently included an O-line that seemed to be a human white flag from the opening snap to the final pratfall. The normally aerially obsessed Josh McDaniels called 21 running plays and only five passes in the first half, causing some to wonder if the Patriots were really trying. In the second half however, it became clear why he took that approach: to throw was to put Brady at risk of dismemberment.

Brady was sacked twice and drilled eight other times, including once so late by Olivier Vernon it was nearly a criminal assault. That didn’t stop Vernon from hitting him again on the next play. By the end of the day, Brady was wearing Vernon like a front grille.

In two weeks, some form of the Patriots will play in the AFC divisional round knowing they must play better than they’ve played for nearly two months to stay alive. Players with broken and cracked parts will play and some under lengthy repair, like Edelman, will as well.

They will feel better. But will they be at their best? Not even they are sure of that any more.

“We have to play well going forward if we want to make anything of our season,’’ Brady said. “We just have to play well two weeks from now. That’s all that really matters. That’s what our whole season will come down to.”

GLENDALE, Ariz. — It’s not easy for the No. 1 team in the country to have an inferiority complex, but who could blame Clemson if it did?

Undefeated at 13-0, conqueror of fourth-ranked Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl as well as Notre Dame, Florida State and North Carolina during the regular season, the Clemson Tigers have been roaring loudly all year that they have the best college football team in the land and maybe even one that could go 8-8 in the AFC South. Yet when the Tigers face Alabama tomorrow night at University of Phoenix Stadium, they will be 61⁄2-point underdogs to the 12-1 Crimson Tide, at least in the opinion of Vegas’ wiseguys.

“Even Flipper the Dolphin picked against us,” Clemson safety Jayron Kearse joked last week about the annual pregame event in which a dolphin predicts the Orange Bowl winner and chose the Sooners. It appears Kearse and his teammates are used to this sort of disrespect, but after clobbering Oklahoma, 37-17, their coach made clear his feelings in a postgame bombast.

“We ain’t no underdog!” Dabo Swinney hollered into an ESPN microphone. Tomorrow night his players will have the opportunity to prove it one last time. If they do, the main reason will be Deshaun Watson’s legs and arm.

Clemson’s stunningly versatile quarterback became only the third player in FBS history to pass for at least 3,800 yards and run for more than 1,000 yards in one season. Not one of those yards was gained against the massive Alabama front line that features two 300-pound-plus defensive tackles, A’Shawn Robinson and Jarran Reed (both are projected to be first-round NFL picks), and a 252-pound middle linebacker with quickness and surliness named Reggie Ragland, of course. So that, then, is the problem for Clemson and the main reason the wiseguys don’t believe in them.

Alabama’s defense hasn’t allowed a quarterback to rush for more than 29 yards all season and in coach Nick Saban’s nine years in Tuscaloosa his defenses have allowed no (as in ZE-ro, as they say in Alabama) quarterbacks to rush for 100 yards. So we have the immovable object vs. the irresistible force tomorrow night and the one that refuses to give will be the second national champion crowned under the college football playoff system.

Alabama’s side of the equation has shown little inclination to waver. It held third-ranked Michigan State to 29 rushing yards in the Cotton Bowl, the sixth straight game in which it allowed fewer than 100 rushing yards. That same defense has posted an FBS-leading 50 sacks, so don’t think throwing on them will be elementary, my dear Watson, either.

Vegas generally knows what it’s talking about and one can certainly see why betting against Alabama might seem unwise, but four of the last five times the oddsmakers made Clemson an underdog the Tigers have won, so there you go. But can they beat Saban’s team, one many believe would have won the AFC South this year?

“I’m glad we’re going against the best,” Clemson linebacker Ben Boulware boldly claimed last week before catching himself. “Well, what everybody says is the best team in college football. Technically, we’re ranked No. 1.”

Tomorrow night Watson will try his best to prove it’s more than a technicality and he has the unique talents to do so, because he presents an unusual problem for Alabama. Unlike most of the quarterbacks the Tide have shut down, Watson can throw over them or run through them with equal alacrity.

Watson has rushed for 11 touchdowns this season, which is five more than Alabama’s rush defense has allowed. Just as significantly, Watson has completed 42.6 percent of his throws beyond 20 yards, which is a significantly high success rate for the long ball. Tomorrow night he will face a defense that is long-ball challenged, having allowed a 39.3 percent completion percentage on throws beyond 20 yards.

What Watson might do to Alabama is the same thing Johnny Manziel did several years ago and Cam Newton did before him and even South Carolina’s Stephen Garcia did to a lesser extent in 2010 when the Gamecocks upset the then-No.1 Tide. All of them beat Alabama’s defense with their arms, but by setting those throws up with their legs, or at least the threat those legs posed.

Only Newton ran better than Watson (and that’s debatable at Clemson), so Alabama will be faced with the kind of running-passing threat that has undone their seasons in the past. Add to that one final factor and you may decide to invest the kids’ college funds in a wager on Clemson and it is this: Watson runs fast and the offense he operates runs faster.

Saban acknowledged last week Clemson will be the fastest-operating offense Alabama has faced this season, one that runs so many plays it’s “like playing a game and a half.” Clemson ranked 11th in the country in plays run, averaging 80.1 a game. Alabama has faced only one offense in the top 20 in that category. What that means is if Watson can make some plays and keep his team quickly lining back up, it has a chance to do to the staggeringly massive Alabama defensive front what that defense usually does to its opponents: wear them out.

In Clemson’s last three wins, Watson has averaged 19 runs and 104 rushing yards per game. He’s also run for six scores, one more rushing touchdown than Alabama has allowed. That threat has to be respected. If it slows the Alabama rush and Watson makes its secondary pay where it’s most vulnerable — against the deep pass — the Tide may slowly recede and Clemson may finally prove to the doubters they’re more than “technically No. 1.”

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Harlon Barnett is best remembered in New England as the defensive back Barry Sanders twice turned around like a spinning top without Barnett ever being touched by a blocker and without Barnett laying a finger on Sanders as he broke by him on his way to a touchdown run so spectacular that 21 years later Barnett admits he’s still asked about it every fall.

With an experience like that, it is clear Barnett understands what an elusive running back can do to you. He knows how he can embarrass you and leave you tackling air, but as the co-defensive coordinator of Michigan’s State’s third-ranked Spartans this year, he also knows what a different kind of back can do to you. A back who is not about slipping and sliding and dipping and diving like Sanders but one that seeks out collisions like a demolition derby driver.

Barnett got a clear understanding of that as he watched Alabama’s Derrick Henry on tape as he prepared his defense to face Alabama in the Cotton Bowl on New Year’s Eve. Barnett stacked the box, committing his defense to stifling Henry and mostly succeeding, holding him to 75 yards, which was roughly half of the 147.2 yards per game he averaged this season.

Of course by so doing, he opened up his pass defense to being riddled by Alabama quarterback Jake Coker, who is normally a secondary threat. While Henry was limited, the effort it took to do it turned Alabama freshman wide receiver Calvin Ridley into an unstoppable force in what became a 38-0 rout of the Spartans.

So Barnett saw the kind of nightmare Clemson faces tonight in the College Football Playoff championship game at University of Phoenix Stadium. You can focus on stopping Derrick Henry if you want, but if you do you’ll pay for it. Then again, if you don’t stop Derrick Henry you’ll really pay for it.

Henry piles up yards far differently than Sanders did, but no less effectively. Where Sanders broke your ankles with shiftiness, Henry breaks your will by hitting you for four quarters like a freight train free rolling down a mountainside. While you splinter apart, he rolls on.

Tonight, Henry will try to do that kind of severe damage to undefeated (14-0) and top-ranked Clemson. For the Tigers to stand up to the pounding the 242-pound Henry will provide, Barnett understands, it will take more than physicality and eight in the box. It will take a resolve that is frankly difficult to maintain.

“As the game progresses, people wear down,” Barnett said on the eve of that Cotton Bowl loss. “You get tired of hitting that big back. Boom! Again! Boom! And again and again. Boom! You have to have the mental toughness to be able to say, ‘Hold on.’ It’s a test of wills and his will has won out a lot of times this season.”

Certainly it has and Henry has the numbers to substantiate that. The Heisman Trophy winner rushed for 2,061 yards on 359 carries this season, scoring 25 times and averaging 5.7 yards per rush. In other words, if you give it to him twice someone’s saying, “First down, Alabama!”

Henry lugged the ball 90 times in Alabama’s last two regular-season games alone, a wearying work rate he somehow seems impervious to. In the opinion of Coker, however, Henry doesn’t get better as the game progresses, as is often suggested about great running backs. Rather, he makes everyone else get worse.

“He stays the same and everybody else changes,” Coker said of the effect Henry has on opposing defenses.

Henry himself is a young man of few words. He knows what he’s capable of and expects to do it but when the subject of wearing down comes up, he looks at you like you’re suffering from the effects of him having run over you a dozen times or two.

“I think it’s all just your mindset,” Henry said of carrying the ball 90 times in those back-to-back late-season games. “Let it affect you, then it’s going to affect you.”

Clemson is being told the same thing about trying to wrestle him to the ground. Let the pounding affect you and it will affect you. Not to mention how it will affect the game.

“We watch film and we see weaknesses,” Clemson’s 6-foot-5 safety Jayron Kearse insisted last week. “We watched the Michigan State game and they held him to 60-something yards, so it can be done. Coach (Brent) Venables (the Tigers defensive coordinator) has to put us in a position to do that.”

One wonders exactly what film Kearse was watching if he saw weaknesses in Henry. Then again, maybe coach Venables was wise enough not to point out that Barnett had put Michigan State’s defense in just the position Kearse hopes to be in and lost by 38 points.

That’s a runner with an impact, the kind that can be felt if you fail to stop him and, perhaps significantly again tonight, even if you do.

GLENDALE, Ariz. — To be a champion means many things. You must be resilient, resourceful and resolute, but in the deciding moments of a game like last night’s College Football Playoff Championship you must often be something more.

You must be fearless. To win in such moments, to overcome an opponent as ferocious as Clemson proved to be, you must not be afraid to lose and Alabama was not.

Last night, Alabama coach Nick Saban was fearless and because of it his Crimson Tide won him his fourth national title in seven years with a 45-40 win. He now has five titles overall, leaving him only one away from the college record of six held by the man who is the measuring stick for all Alabama coaches, Paul “Bear’’ Bryant.

Saban was bold enough to call a play no one expected at a time where if things went awry all might be lost. Saban understood the risk. It was part of the calculus that only the great coaches totally master.

He understood the risk, then he took it. Nick Saban was bold enough to risk defeat in the cause of victory.

With 10:34 to play, Saban’s struggling Alabama team kicked a 34-yard field goal to tie the game, 24-24. By that point Clemson’s undefeated and No. 1-ranked Tigers had shown their own brand of resilience, resourcefulness and resoluteness. They’d shown they were not underdogs, as the world thought they were, but rather Alabama’s equal in every way.

They’d also shown they had a quarterback who appeared to possess the deadly power of kryptonite when facing Alabama’s Superman defense. That defense was the backbone of everything the Crimson Tide had done all season on its way to a 13-1 record and a No. 1 ranking in the eyes of Las Vegas’ oddsmakers despite being ranked No. 2 in the country’s college football polls.

Realizing the situation his team was in, Saban understood that to give the ball back to Watson — who would finish the night with 498 yards of total offense including 405 passing yards and four touchdown throws — was to court disaster or, at the minimum, serious agida. So instead Saban opted for the boldness only someone who has already won four national championships can consider.

As Clemson lined up to receive the kick, 6-foot-5 safety Jayron Kearse looked to his right for a moment and as the ball suddenly shot up into the air off the foot of Adam Griffith and began to float his way he seemed to freeze, stunned by the boldness of what he was seeing.

Saban had decided this was the time. This was the moment. This was when boldness would be rewarded or forever be remembered as Saban’s Folly.

As that ball floated as if passed rather than kicked, Alabama freshman Marlon Humphrey ran in an arc toward the sideline and away from the still frozen Kearse, the ball spinning above him before turning over and beginning to drop.

Now it was all about timing and calm detachment and the freshman from Hoover, Ala., who had dreamed of doing many things for the Crimson Tide since he was a young boy but surely never something quite like this, hauled that falling football in over his shoulder like Willie Mays running down an arching fly ball to the deepest part of center field.

He made the catch right at the 50-yard line, Kearse finally awakening from his Saban-induced slumber and turning to give chase too late to accomplish anything but appeal to the officials that something had to be — surely had to be — amiss.

Something was but it was not the call or its execution. It was Clemson’s momentary lapse, the instant that divides the winner from the loser in what would become a night-long struggle.

Two plays later Clemson’s defense had the second of three busted coverages and tight end O.J. Howard ran wide open, catching a 51-yard touchdown pass. It was one of two he would score in similar fashion, running free after a Clemson mistake, on his way to 208 receiving yards and the only two touchdowns he scored all season. Alabama had the lead now and would never give it back.

“I felt if we didn’t do something to change the momentum of the game we wouldn’t have a chance to win,’’ Saban would later admit.

Clemson would come close, but barely two minutes later following a Clemson field goal that closed the margin to 31-27, Drake Kenyan ran the kickoff back 95 yards for a touchdown and that was, for all intents and purposes, that.

Two special plays by Alabama’s special teams were really all that separated them from Clemson, who battled them tooth-and-nail all night in a game that produced 1,027 yards, 85 points and a lifetime of moments that won’t be forgotten in Alabama or even at Clemson.

“I think special teams made the difference in this game,’’ Saban would say after the golden confetti had fallen all around him and his team. It may have been one of the great understatements in college football history.

GLENDALE, Ariz. — It wasn’t just Alabama that reigned Monday night at University of Phoenix Stadium. So did chaos, and in the end, the latter made the Crimson Tide national champions for the fourth time in seven years.

In a tight game between equals, mistakes and hesitation often decide who wins. The old adage “he who hesitates is lost” certainly applied to Clemson, whose secondary blew coverage on three critical plays to little-used Alabama tight end O.J. Howard, and it cost them a national championship despite outplaying the Tide most of the night.

Of course, that’s like saying, “Other than the ending, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”

You give up an onside kick, a 95-yard kick return and three completions of more than 50 yards, you’re not achieving anything but a fitful night’s sleep.

“We just had three busts,” Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said ruefully after those plays had given Alabama a 45-40 victory. “We just had three critical errors where we just didn’t do our job.”

In nine SEC games this year, Howard had produced 210 receiving yards. In the biggest game of his life, he produced 208, with those three plays accounting for 167 of them — catches of 63, 53 and 51 yards, the latter two for touchdowns. In the case of both scoring plays, Howard ran wide-open because the Clemson secondary became confused then hesitant and finally frozen. Quarterback Jake Coker could not have missed him if he was blindfolded.

On the first, Alabama lined up with two receivers in a bunch formation wide right. Clemson answered with only one corner wide, safety T.J. Green standing well inside on the hash. Coker executed a play-action fake, then turned his shoulders sharply right for an instant to freeze the safety as if he was throwing to the sideline. Green never moved wide as Howard took off up the sideline, leaving him frozen in no-man’s land. As the ball was in the air, Alabama offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin could be seen on the sidelines with his arms upraised, indicating he knew it was a touchdown, and it was, as Howard ran untouched for 51 yards.

His second score, which put Alabama ahead for good in the fourth quarter (31-24) after converting an onside kick, again was a result of confusion, although this time it was more difficult to be sure who should have covered Howard.

Green, the safety, seemed to settle into the short area where Alabama ran no one, while cornerback Cordrea Tankersley was wide and linebacker Ben Boulware had the short sideline. Alabama ran a back into the flat and up the sideline while Howard ran a nine-route straight upfield.

Boulware ran to the outside while Green let Howard run by him, sitting in the middle of the field with no one to cover. Behind him, Tankersley turned inside but didn’t immediately move inside, indicating he expected safety help from Green. That created a huge opening that allowed Coker to easily make the throw and Howard the run. It is difficult to know for sure if it was Tankersley or Green, but the latter turned and pointed deep as the former stumbled before turning to give chase as if to say, “Help!”

There was none.

The alignment made it seem that, at the minimum, Green needed to get deeper, and when he did not, he was covering air. Tankersley’s failure to react quickly to the opening left Howard alone, but had he taken the tight end from the outset it would have left Boulware one-on-one on the back up the sideline, which doesn’t seem like a matchup Clemson wanted. Hence, one assumes Green again lost his assignment.

“Initially it felt like a dream, and I tried to tell everybody to wake me up because I thought it wasn’t real,” Howard admitted. “It was just a great feeling to get in the end zone again. The first touchdown … no guy was over the top, no safety was over the top. I kind of knew that one was going to be open.

“The second one was just the exact same play from last week against Michigan State (in the Cotton Bowl). This time I took the middle of the field, and nobody was in the middle, and it was wide-open. We know those guys play a lot of cover-one and cover-two, so we took advantage of it.”

The third long catch was different in that it was the result of a physical mistake. Howard went in motion and Coker tossed him the ball 3 yards behind the line. As he turned upfield, backup corner Adrian Baker, who was in the game because of a first-half injury to Mackensie Alexander, came up to make the tackle but took a bad inside angle and lost the edge as he tried to beat a block.

Had Alexander gotten wider and forced Howard inside, even if he didn’t bring him down, he would have routed him into Clemson’s pursuit. But his angle gave Howard the corner, and when safety Jayron Kearse tripped over fallen wide receiver Calvin Ridley, there was no one outside to stop Howard, who rambled 63 yards before being driven out of bounds.

One such chunk play is difficult to recover from. Give up three and your odds of winning lessen remarkably. Clemson gave up five if you include Derrick Henry’s 50-yard touchdown run and Kenyan Drake’s 95-yard kickoff return. No matter how brilliant your quarterback — and Deshaun Watson certainly was Monday night — you’re not surviving that very often.

“Championship football is a game of a few plays, and that is really what this one came down to,” Swinney said. “Alabama made them. Give them credit for that.”

That’s one way to look at it. The kindly way.

If anyone believes Chandler Jones’ “confused” state while allegedly standing shirtless and shoeless at the Foxboro Police station Sunday morning was distracting to Bill Belichick they need to think again. This guy coached Lawrence Taylor, remember?

Taylor in that state would have been considered a net positive during some of his explosive years with the New York Giants. In those days, LT was a disruptive player on the field and off but never more so than in the kind of big moments likely to emerge tomorrow in Foxboro. His other problems, frankly, were mostly ignored until the handcuffs appeared, and by then Belichick was gone.

So what do we make of the bizarre circumstances Jones put himself in? In terms of the outcome of tomorrow’s divisional playoff with the Kansas City Chiefs, we probably put him at defensive end and hope he puts himself on top of Alex Smith a few times. In terms of his future, that’s a different issue.

According to Jones’ father, the Rev. Arthur W. Jones Jr., “Everything’s under control. Everything’s cool.” Actually, Reverend, I’d say everything is not cool nor under control when your son ends up in a police station, shirtless and shoeless in January after having blown his mind on artificial weed, avocado ice cream or whatever the hell he was doing.

Last year, Jones’ brother, former UFC light heavyweight champion Jon “Bones” Jones, tested positive for cocaine, was stripped of his title and suspended by the UFC. He has not fought since but his suspension has been lifted. He admitted using cocaine but insisted he didn’t have a problem. Rather he “dibbed and dabbled my fair share” with drugs and “got caught with my pants down.”

He said he was embarrassed and that his brothers, Chandler and Arthur, “were both really disappointed. I know I’ve embarrassed them in their locker rooms with their respective teams.”

Now, Jon Jones’ brother has apparently been caught with his shirt down and yesterday issued his own brief apology for making a “pretty stupid mistake.” Will that “mistake” mean something tomorrow?

Not unless he gets blocked all over the field or benched for acting like a nitwit five days before the biggest game of the season. Of course, if the latter were likely we might never have heard of LT.

Whatever Jones was involved in obviously does not reflect well on him. This is especially true considering he missed the season-ending game against Miami with abdominal pain and a toe injury. Now it looks like he’s hurt his head as well and probably transferred some of that pain to Belichick, who certainly didn’t need this headache at a time when his players were supposed to be focusing on the Chiefs.

Then again, it’s hard to focus on the Chiefs if you can’t focus enough to put a shirt on before you go for a walk on a frigid Sunday morning to visit the police. Anyone ask if he brought donuts?

The idea of being distracted by situations like this however is largely overblown. Professional athletics is a selfish business. While they may play on a team, players are far more worried about their own hide than anyone else’s. That’s simply a fact.

So did any of Jones’ teammates lose focus — or any sleep — over his situation? Not likely, so its impact tomorrow will be far less than the breathless debaters talking about such non-issues believe. What would have an impact is the continued absence of Rob Gronkowski (he missed two practices this week) or if Jones’ playing time is limited . . . but then again his time was already limited by other maladies, so all Belichick really need do is add “blown mind” to “abdomen” and “toe” on the injury report and be done with it.

Belichick addressed this yesterday in his usual manner: He spoke but said little. What he could have said was “I put up with LT. There was a distraction. Chandler doesn’t qualify as a fly on my video screen.”

Instead, he had the following exchange with the local media:

Q: “Specific to Chandler, how will what happened affect how you use him against the Chiefs?”

BB: “Well we’ll find out on Saturday. I could just Xerox you a copy of the game plan and you can send it over to Kansas City. That might be easier for all of us.”

Q: “Do you think the fans have a right to know about what happened to Chandler on Sunday?”

BB: “I’ve already covered this.”

Q: “Do you guys probe more deeply on something like that?”

BB: “I’ve already covered it.”

Q: “But do you go more deeply into that?”

BB: “I’ve said there is nothing more important than the health and well-being of our staff and players. So to me, that covers it.”

Q: “Is there a level of disappointment that this crops up so close to a playoff game?”

BB: “I mean are there any more questions about the Chiefs here?”

Is there a level of disappointment that your leading pass rusher is in a “confused” state, shirtless and shoeless, early on a Sunday morning lying face down outside a police station? What do you think?

Might he be shirtless tomorrow against the Chiefs? What do you think?

I imagine so on the former and doubt it on the latter. I also doubt “everything is cool,” as the good reverend put it. My guess is at the moment it’s very hot for Chandler Jones, but if he can make it hot on Alex Smith nobody will much care, most especially the people claiming they’re concerned about every player’s health and welfare because if they were there’d be a lot of missing players, including Gronkowski, tomorrow.

In truth, that’s the real distraction. The real distraction is how many of Belichick’s players would be considered healthy if anyone in pro football other than their mothers really cared about their health and welfare? If there’s too many who aren’t then Belichick’s minions are more troubled than Jones, because they’re in a tough battle with a team playing consistently well (11 straight victories) at a time when the Pats have been consistently unwell and because of it lost four of their last six.

Distractions? The Pats have more than a few, but Chandler Jones is pretty far down the food chain. Tomorrow’s outcome won’t be decided by where Belichick’s leading pass rusher was Sunday morning. It will be decided by how many of his other players are fit to play tomorrow.

With 8:24 to play in the third quarter of yesterday’s AFC divisional playoff game at the Big Razor, Chiefs coach Andy Reid looked and felt like Estelle Reiner sitting at Katz’s Delicatessen in the film “When Harry Met Sally.”

“I’ll have what she’s having,’’ Reiner famously said as Meg Ryan was expressing herself to her once and future love, Billy Crystal. Reid must have felt pretty much the same as he watched the medically treated and physically challenged Rob Gronkwoski finish off his team with a 16-yard touchdown catch in which he pantsed Chiefs safety Eric Berry.

“I’ll have what he’s having,” Reid must have thought. Most of the Chiefs had to feel the same way about a guy who was only able to practice once all week (forget Friday’s walk through) and had to take a trip to the hospital for treatment and a shot for a knee that was working about as well as a rusty gate at that point of the week.

What Gronkowski proved once again yesterday as he led the Patriots to a 27-20 playoff victory over Reid’s game but outclassed Chiefs was that he is a most remarkable physical specimen and the medical staff that had been laboring over him has a first-class pharmacy attached to it.

Whatever was in the syringe someone at Massachusetts General Hospital stuck into Gronkowski on Thursday, the Chiefs could have used a doctor’s bag full of to stop him. He caught seven passes, recovered a critical onside kick attempt by the Chiefs with just over a minute to play, and while clearly less explosive than on afternoons when his balky knee is more cooperative still managed to score twice and turn those receptions into 83 receiving yards.

With that Gronkowski also ended the Chiefs’ Cinderella story well short of reaching The Royal Ball and began to potentially write a fairy tale of his own. It is one of pain ignored, infirmity overcome and his Royal Gronkness reaffirmed. Truth be told, NFL defenses can’t stop him when he’s healthy and can barely control him when he should be in a wheelchair or stretched out on a sofa.

That Gronkowski hasn’t been himself for weeks has been clear and undeniable. Even yesterday, he lacked the explosiveness that characterizes his play. Yet it didn’t matter because he is a massive target who knows how to break the law without being charged and can put enough fear of embarrassment into defensive backs that it makes them see ghosts, as Pro Bowler Berry did on that final touchdown.

Gronkowski’s first score came on the game’s opening drive, an 8-yard catch that was one of three he made on that drive. It was an immediate pronouncement to the Chiefs that while you may think he’s hurt, he’s not so sure of that.

He’d already taken a short cross 32 yards, trampling through the midst of the Chiefs’ secondary like an elephant herd. Three plays later, he was in the end zone and cornerback Sean Smith was enraged.

Earlier this season, Gronkowski claimed he was being targeted by NFL officials with an itchy trigger finger on their penalty flags, insisting he was being called for offensive pass interference when he was merely doing his job. If his job was to push the defensive back off with both hands to free himself, he did it in All-Pro style on that catch, putting his hamhocks onto the “21” on Smith’s jersey and shoving him to the side before turning around and picking off Tom Brady’s throw in midflight.

As Gronkowski rose up to spike the ball hard enough to deflate it, Smith turned to the officials in hopes of getting a call. His pleas fell upon deaf ears and unseeing eyes and the score was 7-0. The Patriots were off and running.

“You always want to get a fast start, especially being together with everyone,’’ Gronkowski said. “Everyone back out there on the field. We were all just clicking on that drive.’’

But it was his final catch, and the pattern he ran to rid himself of Berry, that truly led Reid to reprise Ms. Reiner’s climactic movie moment. Gronkowski headed upfield from the 16-yard line straight toward the end zone with Berry in safe position behind him. For a moment he hesitated, slowing as if to break his pattern off. Berry saw him slow and took off like a shot, a hero’s welcome back on the Chiefs’ bench after the interception he knew was coming.

One problem: Gronk was stopping but then he was going. His stop-and-go route left him wide open several yards in front of the end zone as Berry ran by him, then slammed on the breaks fully aware he couldn’t catch even a peg-legged Gronkowski in the position he now found himself in.

Brady casually tossed Gronkowski the ball as if the two were playing catch — which they were — and Gronk then turned and jogged/limped into the end zone to make the score 21-6. The Chiefs would make a game of it after that, but the ending had already been written.

Just to be sure though, Gronkowski rose up like the Phoenix to catch the ball one last time, grabbing Chiefs kicker Cairo Santos’ onside kick attempt with 72 seconds to play. It was Gronk’s final reminder to them that while they had shown some spunk to battle back, they didn’t have what he had.

All they had was a reminder of what it’s like to be Gronked.

Statistics, I’ve long felt, are like hostages. You can make them say whatever you want.

We are reminded of this today as we’re being inundated with numbers. Coincidentally, all those numbers seem to conclude to those offering them up that the Denver Broncos are wasting their time showing up at Sports Authority Field at Mile High on Sunday.

They have “zero chance of winning,” as one radio talking head keeps bellowing. Several others insist ad nauseam that a team that went 13-4 and already beat the Patriots has “a 20 percent chance” of winning, which means no chance but with manners.

These conclusions are, one would hope, not shared in Foxboro, where the people who will actually decide who wins are either preparing for their toughest challenge of the season or listening to the radio while playing video games because, well, the numbers say it’s already been decided.

If they are buying into this conclusion that the stats tell the story, then, New England, we have a problem.

Fortunately, the players and coaches know better than the stat geeks. They understand that if one reads numbers to come to a conclusion, then one must read all the numbers, not merely the ones that lead where you want to go.

For example, we keep hearing how Tom Brady is 11-5 in head-to-head struggles with Peyton Manning. He is and that’s good news. It shows his dominance over the past 16 meetings, and hence has been widely cited.

But if it has meaning, does not 2-6 in Denver also have meaning? That is Brady’s record in the Mile High City. Whether that’s because they don’t have avocado ice cream there or because room service refuses to bring him hot food when it’s cold and cold food when it’s hot is unknown. All that’s known is 2-6 in Denver. This, of course, is dismissed as too small a sample.

That being the case, then 1-2 is obviously meaningless, which is Brady’s record vs. Manning in AFC Championship Games. This is also a convenient use of stats. We use them to say what we want and ignore those that don’t follow the script.

People in these parts don’t want to hear that Brady loses three-quarters of the time he goes to Denver. We don’t want the numbers to say he has lost two-thirds of the time he’s faced Manning in an AFC title game. So, we use stats to prove how inept Manning and the Broncos offense is.

Kerry Byrne wrote in yesterday’s Herald an interesting piece that Denver’s 31st ranked passer rating is the worst ever for a final four contender since the league expanded to 32 teams. The only team worse was the 1979 Buccaneers, who lost the NFC Championship Game to the Rams, 9-0. New England looks at those numbers and smiles. Denver has no chance.

That the two have already played once this season and the Broncos won in overtime is dismissed because “we didn’t have ah playahs!” Julian Edelman and Danny Amendola were out and Rob Gronkowski got knocked out of the game. Jamie Collins was MIA (and may be again). Of course, Denver was without or lost during the game three of its best defenders: DeMarcus Ware, T.J. Ward and Sylvester Williams, as well as a starting tackle but who’s counting?

The mysterious nature of numbers in a situation like this is that the ones that “prove” the Broncos have no chance take on added meaning here. The ones that argue otherwise are widely trumpeted throughout the Rocky Mountains.

Yes, Brady is 11-5 vs. Manning, but they’re 5-5 in their last 10 meetings. He’s 2-2 against him in the playoffs but 0-2 against him in the playoffs since 2006. Neither has beaten the other on the road in more than eight years and the Pats are 3-3 in road playoff games during the Belichick-Brady era and 0-2 in playoff games in Denver.

“I know we’ve had a lot of lonely feelings when you’re driving out of that stadium,” Brady said this week. “We’ve had some pretty tough losses there over the years, because they’ve had really good teams.”

For the record, they still do. So do the Patriots. That’s why none of the numbers you keep hearing mean a thing. The only numbers that will mean anything are the ones put on the scoreboard Sunday. Past performance won’t mean anything. The only thing that will mean anything is present performance.

The proof of this was on display barely a week ago when the Patriots beat the Kansas City Chiefs in the divisional round, stopping their 11-game winning streak. In the eyes of New Englanders, the Patriots dominated what became a 27-20 victory because their offense rose from the ashes due to the return to health of Gronkowski and Edelman. Yet the truth is the Chiefs did exactly what they hoped.

They controlled the clock, holding a better than 15-minute advantage, limited Brady to 58 plays and forced three turnovers . . . or should have. The Chiefs won 11 straight because their offense controlled the ball and limited its mistakes and the defense made 22 interceptions and recovered five fumbles. They lived off those plays, as the Broncos did Sunday when they forced a late turnover by the Steelers and turned it into the winning touchdown.

Saturday, the stats lied. It said the Chiefs forced no turnovers when they dropped three potential interceptions. One was a near-sure touchdown had a ball that hit Sean Smith in the belly not ended up on the ground with nothing between him and the Rhode Island border but air. The second was a more difficult one to rookie Marcus Peters, but in the 11 games prior he caught such balls. This time he didn’t. And the last bounced off Tamba Hali’s hands and right to Edelman for a game-ending first down of “The Twilight Zone” variety. The plays were there, but the Chiefs didn’t make them.

That’s what decides games. Not misshapen stats twisted to say what you want. Good players decide the game, not stat geeks, as they will again Sunday, and both sides have plenty of ’em.

John Elway knows better than anyone else the situation Peyton Manning faces Sunday afternoon. He knows because he lived it.

In a sport in which the biggest games are played in January, Peyton Manning, like Elway and Dan Marino before him, is Mr. October. Manning is The King of the Regular Season. He is the Crown Prince of the Record Book. He is, as Elway nearly was, the winner of everything but a royal ring collection, which is the only collection that truly lasts.

Trophies? He’s got a basement full. Cash? He’s got a bank vault full. Records? He’s got a website full. Endorsements? He’s got a resume full. But championships? Then it’s like Frank Sinatra once sang so about regrets: Manning has a few, but then again, too few to mention.

Elway was facing the same fate until at the unlikely ages of 37 and 38, with his once prolific passing powers fading, he ended his career with two Super Bowl victories won primarily by staying out of the way. On Sunday, it would be best for Peyton Manning to do the same.

Elway got the rings that define a quarterback’s success in the NFL by throwing for 123 yards in his first Super Bowl victory. The following year, in his last game, he threw for 336 yards and a touchdown and ran for another in a Super Bowl MVP finale to his career. It was fairytale stuff for Elway, but how will it end for a soon-to-be 39-year-old Manning?

To a degree that’s up to him, but it’s also up to his old friend and longtime nemesis. It will be up to Tom Brady, too.

Manning comes into what seems surely the final chapter in the Tale of Two Quarterbacks armed with home-field advantage, a ravenous defense, a pounding running game and an arm that no longer works. It is the 17th chapter of a shared fable, but Brady has nothing to lose but a football game. Manning, on the other hand, has his legacy to lose.

If he wins, he will have a chance to tie Elway and six other quarterbacks who won two Super Bowls. He has no chance to come within hailing distance of Brady, of course, who has already been there six times and won four. If Brady wins again, he would become the only quarterback to win five times, but that would only add to a legacy long established, often at Manning’s expense.

Manning, on the other hand, carries the weight of how he will be remembered into Sports Authority Field at Mile High. Win twice more, even if it’s mostly by handing off, and much of what has been said about him seemingly since birth will have been verified. Fail again, and he will be vilified as someone who wilted in the hottest moments.

For all his records, Manning is not the greatest quarterback of all-time, or even his own time. Frankly, he’s not even as great as his boss, Elway, who took three dog teams to Super Bowls and lost before finally winning with the final two.

If someone wants to continue the Manning-Brady debate, the latter would be on the prime-time stage while Manning would be in the football version of the anti-room occupied by Carly Fiorina and Rand Paul on Debate Night. In that debate, Manning is no longer on the main stage.

For all his five regular-season MVPs and pages of records, Manning can’t even win a debate around the Thanksgiving table because his younger brother, Eli, is 8-3 in the playoffs to his 12-13, and is 2-0 in Super Bowls to his 1-2. What makes that even worse is Eli’s wins came at Brady’s expense. He slayed the dragon that keeps melting his brother. Maybe the Manning-Brady Debate focused on the wrong Manning all these years?

Not really. Peyton and Brady are the alpha males of their quarterbacking time, but the gulf between them can’t be bridged by one more win for Manning Sunday, or even another in Super Bowl 50. Yet there is still more on the line for him than Brady.

Only 11 quarterbacks have won multiple Super Bowls, seven winning twice, one (Troy Aikman) winning three times and three winning four times. If Manning can at least get a second, he’s right there with Elway, Eli and his other contemporary, Ben Roethlisberger.

To end his career with anything less is to transform him into the Reggie Jackson of pro football. It is one thing to be Mr. October in the major leagues. It’s quite another to be the Mr. October of the NFL. But that is the reality of Manning’s career if he loses Sunday to Brady, who leads their showdowns 11-5 but is 5-5 in their last 10 meetings and 1-2 against Manning in title games.

Yet to win, Manning must subjugate himself in un-Manning-like fashion. He must mostly stay out of the way, as Elway did at the end of his career. He must concede he is now a complementary part, someone whose first job is to avoid the errors of his past if he is to beat Brady.

The way was laid out for him two months ago by Brock Osweiler, who replaced him for half the season when a weak arm and aching arch left him in street clothes the last time these teams met. In that game, Denver employed at least two tight ends on 50 snaps, more than at any other time this season. Their offense rushed for 179 yards, including a 48-yard touchdown run in overtime by C.J. Anderson. They trampled the Patriots rather than bombed them.

Mostly, Osweiler stayed out of the way. More than likely, Manning will be asked to do much the same. Last week against the Steelers, Manning took Denver out of a number of called passes when he saw blitzes coming and put the Broncos into successful running plays. He beat the Steelers with his head more than his arm. If he can duplicate that Sunday, he will at least have a chance to match his brother’s ring collection.

But that is where Brady comes in. If Brady can dismantle arguably the best and fastest defense in the NFL with his horizontal passing game and force one final shootout, that is a game the most prolific passer in NFL history cannot win.

Nobody knows that better than his boss, John Elway. And unlike Peyton Manning, he has the rings to prove it.

DENVER — When the week of preparation began in Foxboro for today’s AFC Championship Game, Bill Belichick had a stern warning for his hard-nosed defense. “Go by what you see,” he cautioned them.

Belichick’s point was when you’re facing Peyton Manning, it is natural to overthink. It is also easy to overlook the obvious.

Manning has become an NFL icon by throwing the football, hollering “Omaha” and lacerating defenses, but that is no longer who he is. Nor is it what Denver coach Gary Kubiak wants him to be. Belichick reminded his team of that not by putting up video of Manning’s struggles but by reminding his defense of a number.

“Bill read off a stat today,” safety Devin McCourty recalled. “I think it was 10 games where they rushed over 100 yards — they won nine of them. That’s a great stat for an offense and I think it’s big for us to go out there and play well and stop the run because when they run the ball well they usually win. It’s kind of a direct correlation for us that we’ve got to make sure we go out there, play well in the run game. I think that will set up the rest of our defense.

“If they’re able to run the ball and get five or six yards on a first down, move the chains on a second down, it will be a long day for us because they have a quarterback who can drive the field and make plays, make the right decisions to score points on us. I think we’ve got to try and get them behind and try to play good defense on first down and not let them just pound us and be able to pound the ball.”

Pounding the ball has not often been associated with Peyton Manning. But even before a spate of injuries turned Manning into a shadow of what he once was, Kubiak arrived with a message. In a time of endless passing, he wants to run.

Kubiak favors the stretch run zone blocking scheme that left the Patriots defense in tatters two months ago, but it would be natural to assume that was because Manning was sidelined and inexperienced Brock Osweiler was running things. It was not. What Belichick reminded his team was that what they saw Nov. 29, when Denver rushed 32 times for 179 yards and three touchdowns, is what they will see again . . . and again . . . and again . . . if they can’t stop C.J. Anderson and Ronnie Hillman.

The basis of that running game, which produced 1,718 rushing yards this season as the explosive Hillman (863 yards) and powerful Anderson (720) each averaged more than 4 yards per carry, is an attack that relies on nimble linemen constantly moving laterally, double teaming at the point of attack and cut blocking defenders on the back side. When you’re watching today, notice how many times backside defenders’ are sprawled on the ground, creating cutback lanes inside the original double team or allowing backs to take their runs outside, depending on the flow of the defense.

The Kubiak running attack uses the way the defense reacts to run action against it, not so much opening holes as allowing creases to unfold naturally. This requires great vision on the back’s part, a successful double team on the side the play originally heads and successful cut blocks on the backside. As for downfield blocking, for the most part the corners will be left unblocked under the theory they won’t tackle effectively, while the wide receivers and tight ends (of which at least two will be on the field the majority of the time) block the safeties.

If those stretch runs begin to crease your defense it sets up the next level of Kubiak’s offense: play-action passing that even a sore-armed Manning can be successful with because of the defensive requirement to commit ever more personnel to stopping the run.

“They say a running game and good defense wins Super Bowls,” Broncos receiver Demaryius Thomas said this week. “That’s what we do, and I am going to do whatever I’ve got to do to help.

“I like when we run the ball because it opens up stuff downfield. I’d rather have a big play than the short ones. Everybody bought in quick.”

Whatever the truth of that latter statement, that has become reality in Denver, even for Manning, who for most of his career would have thrown it 77 percent of the time, as Tom Brady did last week to beat the Chiefs, if he had his druthers.

His arm strength no longer allows that, but it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t try if he could. Kubiak’s scheme demands other things, though, and Manning has accepted his role. Last week against the Steelers, he willingly audibled out of pass plays and into runs he felt were likely to be more successful, something the Pats must understand is Manning’s new normal.

“Peyton’s the ultimate play caller,” Steelers coach Mike Tomlin said after Manning led a fourth-quarter comeback with a run-heavy offense (33 rushes, 37 throws). “He got them in some good checks and did a nice job. We got to a point in the game where we had to take some calculated risks, and that’s why, I’m sure, they started him.”

While it would be easy to convince yourself to think pass first when you see Manning coming, what the Patriots must deal with first is Kubiak’s zone-run offense, which relies on the defense always facing bad decisions. Jump outside to stop the wide run off the double team and the runner cuts back into a crease on the inside. Stay stout protecting the inside and he bounces outside against a defense whose backside pursuit has been leveled and whose safeties have wide receivers in their grill. That is almost exactly how Anderson ran around left end for a 48-yard touchdown in overtime to beat the Pats, capping their outscoring the Patriots 23-10 in the fourth quarter and OT.

“I’m sure we’ll be challenged by that again,” Belichick said. “They always challenge you in the running game. They do a great job of setting up formations and trying to put your defense in a run-pass conflict, or some kind of a compromising spot with their formations, or their ability to change plays based on what the better look is. If we’re not sound, if we don’t play with good technique, if we don’t tackle well, it will be a problem. If we do those things then we should be competitive, but it won’t be easy.”

Not easy to beat because the Broncos’ offensive approach is not gunslinging anymore. It’s a punch in the face.

“When he came in, we knew the run game was going to be big,” Hillman said. “It was just different going from that (passing) style offense to the one we are now. It is a lot more run heavy.

“We have to run the ball for us to be successful this week. That’s what we’re going to do. That’s what we do and everybody knows it. We just have to hit them in the mouth.”

To survive that the Patriots have two choices: punch back or go home.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Coaches always want more out of their players than they get, but in Luke Kuechly’s case Panthers coach Ron Rivera might have to make an exception.

“What more could you ask for than a guy to come in and take the league by storm?” Kuechly’s teammate, tight end Greg Olsen, said yesterday. “There is that expectation of what more can he do, year in and year out. He seems to top himself. He’s a special player.”

The Boston College product did much the same during his years at The Heights, where he was an immediate starter and won the Butkus Award as college football’s premier linebacker in his junior season before the Panthers made him the ninth selection in the 2012 NFL draft. Since then, Kuechly has simply done more while running around the NFL than any other middle linebacker in the game, which is saying something considering the competition.

Kuechly has been credited with 591 tackles in four seasons in Carolina, most in the NFL in that span, and 11 interceptions, most by any linebacker. In two playoff wins this season, he leads a ball-hawking defense with 19 tackles, three passes defended and two interception returns for touchdowns.

Kuechly now has three Pro Bowl appearances, one Defensive Player of the Year award, and he’s about to appear in the Super Bowl.

“Obviously, 59 (Kuechly’s number) is the key to their defense,” Denver Broncos offensive coordinator Rick Dennison said. “He kind of gets them all going in the right direction. . . . They like to bring four or five, and that pressure creates problems and turning the ball over. They all have good ball skills. . . . (No.) 59 has great ball skills. He’s the leader of that bunch.”

That bunch led the NFL in forced turnovers this season because they all play the way Kuechly plays, which is to say fast, aggressive and intelligent. What allows that kind of freedom is more than speed and an aggressive nature, however. To play fast you have to think fast, and to think fast you have to know what you’re doing before you do it.

That is what Kuechly’s game is all about, but it will be sorely tested Sunday when he is asked to match wits with Peyton Manning, who along with Tom Brady is one of the smartest signal-callers in the game. One of Manning’s greatest strengths is his ability to outthink his opponent, consistently getting his offense out of calls that would be trumped by the defense.

Across the line of scrimmage from Manning, the 24-year-old Kuechly will stand, his mind running like a computer trying to match the 39-year-old Broncos quarterback’s mainframe. That matchup might decide Super Bowl 50, and both sides know it.

“There is definitely some back and forth,” Kuechly said. “I think he’s probably one of the best guys at the line of scrimmage. He’s been around a long time. He can switch stuff and get them into plays that allow them to be successful. . . . We have to be on top of our game because we know he’s going to be on top of his.

“He’s got an audible for just about everything it seems. He has all his gyrations, hand motions and his words, but the biggest thing is doing your job. You have to play your game. Theoretically, we have a defense for everything. It’s just who is going to execute it better.

“We’ll have a good plan, but I’m sure there’ll be some back and forth.”

When those times come, the Panthers believe their kid linebacker will be as ready as the old man across the line trying to pick his brain. If Manning gets the best of him, it won’t be because Kuechly was outworked.

“He’s the ultimate professional,” Panthers quarterback Cam Newton said of Kuechly. “He put so much pressure on me when he first got here, staying late, watching extra film, making sure that everyone on the defensive side knew what they were doing. For me watching, it was a competitive enviousness. I was like, ‘Dang, he gets it.’ ”

Panthers defensive coordinator Sean McDermott is the first to acknowledge that, seeing Kuechly’s role as an on-field extension of his teachings. For both, Sunday will be their sternest test.

“We know what (Manning) does at the line of scrimmage,” McDermott said. “Luke does a great job for us. He studies a lot of tape and does put us in and out of plays similar to what Peyton does on offense. Trust is earned. He’s earned my trust and the trust of the players around him.”

That trust has grown both from the physical nature of his play and the speed with which he arrives at the ball. The latter comes as much from long hours in darkened video rooms as from the gift of fast-twitch muscles, yet for all Kuechly’s preparation, at some point, football comes down to football. Mind games might be played, but plays must be made, too, and to make them requires an attitude that, to be kind, would be considered highly anti-social in any other environment.

“He has this alter ego he manages to control,” Newton said of Kuechly. “In the locker room, he’s so jolly, like, ‘Hi Cameron.’ Then on the field he’s like, ‘Arrrrgh!’ It’s crazy.”

Crazy is as much a job requirement for Luke Kuechly as intellect, speed or aggression. It is the part less often discussed but no less a part of his Sunday resume.

“I don’t know him off the field, but obviously he’s an animal on the field,” Broncos tight end Owen Daniels said. “He’s sideline-to-sideline, flying around, passing guys, his own teammates, to make tackles. You see all that stuff on film, and it’s really impressive. Good to know he’s a nice guy off the field. We’re different people on the field.”

Certainly Luke Kuechly is. Just ask the guys trying to block him . . . or the one trying to outthink him.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — The truth is, it really doesn’t matter what happens on Sunday night. Not, at least, in any historical context.

Sure Peyton Manning wants to win what common sense and good sense both say should be his last professional football game when he faces the Carolina Panthers in Super Bowl 50. Win or lose, will that change whatever your opinion of him already is? Truthfully, no it will not.

In New England, Manning will always be the choker who “couldn’t win the big one,’’ even though his team has eliminated the Patriots the last three times he’s faced them in the AFC Championship Game (which all seemed like big games to me) and is 3-2 overall against Bill Belichick and Tom Brady in the playoffs. Despite that, Manning’s legacy in these parts will always be determined by how he started, which was losing six straight to Brady, including in the playoffs in 2003 and 2004 to a defense ranked No. 1 and No. 2 in points allowed. Manning was 0-5 against those Super Bowl-winning teams which, frankly, was no crime because they were better than the Colts.

Since then, Manning has fared better but few in New England care. Although he’s 6-5 since the end of that Super Bowl run and eliminated the Patriots the last three times he’s faced them in the playoffs, it won’t matter. He’s 1-2 in Super Bowls while Brady is 4-2 so adding one more ring to his collection will not change his critics’ opinion.

Same is true for the more fair-minded parts of the larger world. For those who think Manning is one of the greatest passers of all time, another Super Bowl victory, while preferable, is not necessary to prove it as the stage lights darken and the curtain comes down on what has been a brilliant career.

Manning has had three neck surgeries, foot surgery, significant elbow nerve problems, and announced this week he will need a hip replacement at some point. His soon-to-be 40-year-old body may be the oldest on the planet when it comes to tread wear. Although he is not yet Willie Mays in the 1973 World Series or Babe Ruth in a Boston Braves uniform, he is much closer to that than to the quarterback who set a standard for passing excellence for the past 18 years. On that there can be no debate, even from Manning himself.

He will soon retire first in career passing yards (71,940) and touchdowns (539), second in completions (6,125) and attempts (9,380), fourth in completion percentage (65.3) and fifth in quarterback rating (96.5). For those who insist he’s been a life-long choker, he will also retire first in game-winning drives (56). But those are not his only numbers.

For football lifers, Manning’s legacy as the game’s greatest passer will remain secure regardless of whether he repeats his Super Bowl debacle of two years ago against the Seahawks or plays the most brilliant game of his career. They look at the totality of the man’s accomplishments and see few peers.

His critics, on the other hand, look at his playoff failures, where he is 13-13 overall with a remarkable NINE one-and-dones and see a figment of the statistical imagination. They see an aggregator, Mr. October in a game that reveres Mr. January.

If the Broncos, powered not by Manning but by the NFL’s No. 1 defense, win Sunday he will become the oldest quarterback ever to claim the Lombardi Trophy at 39 years, 320 days. He is already one of only seven quarterbacks to reach four Super Bowls and would become one of only 12 with multiple Super Bowl wins. He would also be the only quarterback in NFL history to win a Super Bowl with two different teams. Yet the truth is, after two weeks of endless prattling on about Manning’s legacy, it’s already set in stone.

For the hard-hearted, he will always be less than he should have been. For the more realistic he will always be a victim of his regular-season excellence because the truth is, while his play has slipped in the postseason, that holds true for most great quarterbacks.

There are no Jacksonville Jaguars or Cleveland Browns to assault in the playoffs. The defenses you face are usually the stoutest in football.

Regardless of how things turn out against the favored Panthers, unless you have a heart as cold as a glacier, it is always sad to see the end arrive for a great performer. When Sinatra could no longer carry a tune or Ali couldn’t slip a punch, a loss is felt by everyone who remembered them at their height. Part of what makes it so is not only their personal defeat but the reminder of the one looming ahead for us all.

I had the joy of being in the RCA Dome when it all began for Manning on Sept. 9, 1998. This hotshot rookie from Tennessee was facing Dan Marino, the Peyton Manning of his day. Manning was both brilliant and addled that game, passing for 302 yards to Marino’s 135 in a 24-15 defeat.

After it was over, he came in looking like someone had stolen his puppy, a kid not used to being sacked four times and throwing three picks. He talked about learning a lot and he did.

The Colts were 3-13 that year but one season later Manning reversed that to 13-3. He would have only one more losing season in his career yet the truest measuring stick of his value came in 2011 when he missed the entire year with the neck injury that continues to deaden his arm.

That season, a Colts team that had won 10 or more games nine straight seasons went 2-14 and finished 30th in the NFL in total offense. It couldn’t even compete without him. Four years earlier, in 2008, the Patriots lost Brady for the season and went 11-5 with a backup quarterback named Matt Cassel, who went on to prove that’s exactly what he was.

What that says about Manning and Brady and the teams they played on is open to debate, as is nearly everything between them but their jewelry collection. Of the latter, there is no doubt whose is dominant. Sunday night’s outcome won’t change that or Manning’s place in football history.

But Manning will remain whatever you want him to be. Greatest passer? Biggest choker? That’s up to you, not him.

All I know is when I left the RCA Dome that night 18 years ago I knew I’d seen something special, even in defeat. Peyton Manning hasn’t done anything to alter that opinion nor will he on Sunday. But here’s hoping he has one great night left in him, one last game to remind us all why, as Ty Law once told me, “you didn’t sleep the night before you played Peyton Manning.”

That, better than any numbers you can crunch, says all you really need to know about who — and what — he was.

SAN FRANCISCO — At least most of New England and Roger Goodell can finally agree on one thing.

“The intent of what we were doing was not a research project,” Goodell said yesterday when asked about the league’s in-season spot measuring of the PSI of footballs before, in the midst and after games. “It was to make sure that our policies were followed, just as we do in other areas of our game operations.”

Whatever the truth of the latter point, the former certainly seemed obvious. A research project would assume quality control, careful recording of data and statistical-based conclusions. It might even include references to both the Ideal Gas Law and the Ideal Gas Bag Law, the latter of which was offered last May by a Patriots legal team led by an alleged law school graduate named Daniel L. Goldberg who performed about as well as the Tennessee Titans football team did this fall.

What Goodell made clearest, once again, is that this legal issue, which sadly will be revisited on March 3, is no longer about Tom Brady and perhaps never was, although he remains the one who may pay a price for it. What this is about is not PSIs nor ideal or not-so-ideal gas laws or guys slinking into bathrooms with a ballbag over their shoulder or deflated footballs. It’s about power in the workplace.

Roger Goodell and his bosses want to maintain it and the NFL Players Association and its union members want to deflate it. Simple as that. If Tom Brady is caught in the crosshairs, neither side could care less at this point.

Goodell made that obvious during his annual State of the Shield address yesterday when he was asked if he would look to reinstate his four-game suspension of Brady next season if the league wins its case on appeal. This is in some ways the third rail of this entire mess. What if the league wins?

“I’ve said this publicly many times,” Goodell said. “This is not an individual player issue. This is about the rights we negotiated in our Collective Bargaining Agreement. We think they are very clear, we think they are important to the league going forward and we disagree with the district judge’s decision.

“We are appealing that, which is part of the legal process. I am not focused on it right now. I am not going to speculate on what we are going to do. Depending on the outcome, we’ll let the outcome be dictated by the appeals court. When it happens, we’ll deal with it then.”

That is called kicking the can down the highway, a process in recent years that has been a hallmark of how Congress avoids its responsibility to the voters. If the league wins, Goodell will have little choice but to impose the discipline he originally handed down because what else can he do?

My bad?

Do over?

Not happening because he has 31 other clubs who have had players disciplined and suspended for various matters large and small who suffered equally unfairly by his rulings. So what are he and his 32 bosses rooting for from that court?

They’re rooting for their rights to discipline their employees as they see fit be upheld. That’s what they’re rooting for.

They’re not rooting for one of the game’s biggest stars to be suspended for four games, but if he has to be for the bosses to keep their workers in line, hey, it’s only football, guys.

Nobody wants to believe that, but it’s what it boils down to. It’s akin to Goodell saying: “There is no higher priority than player safety.”

Really? Then why will Carolina linebacker Thomas Davis be allowed to play tomorrow with a broken arm? Why will very likely half the players be shot up with Toradol, one of the most powerful pain-killers known to man? Shouldn’t someone who needs a drug normally administered only in emergency rooms to function in a football game be asked to take a seat for his own safety?

Safety? Wait a minute people. It’s the Super Bowl!

Goodell continued down the rabbit hole when asked about the recent decision to allow the Rams to abandon St. Louis for the far greener pastures of Los Angeles. Goodell first said, “The Rams returning to their home of Los Angeles with an incredible stadium complex . . . will be transformational, not just for the Rams, not just for the Los Angeles community but for the NFL.”

First off, if the Rams want to return home they’d have to go back to Cleveland, where they began. Second, they haven’t been in LA in 20 years. Lastly, transformational for whom? It’s transforming St. Louis into a football ghost town.

Despite all that, Goodell later said, “We want to work to try and keep our teams where they are.”

You what? One has moved to LA, a second is threatening to do so unless it can blackmail the people of San Diego into funding a new stadium and a third was just threatening to leave Oakland for Las Vegas, San Antonio but not St. Louis. Sounds like the Ideal Gas Bag Law of franchise management.

After 50 minutes of talking, including 24 questions answered, Roger Goodell was done for the day. Time to do what he and the NFL does best.

Time to sell, baby.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Cam Newton will have more than the weight of the Denver Broncos defense on his shoulders tonight at Levi’s Stadium. He’ll also have the weight of history.

If that history is joined a few times by Von Miller and DeMarcus Ware on top of Newton, Peyton Manning will win what is expected to be his final game without having to do much heavy lifting.

It is difficult to argue that the NFL has now become a passing league. Records that once stood for decades are now seemingly broken every season. Defense has been all but outlawed through rule changes that benefit the offense.

Not surprisingly then, much of the discussion this week about the outcome of Super Bowl 50 has centered around Manning and Newton, the once and future faces of the game. Manning was for nearly two decades the finest pure passer in football. And Newton, with the speed of a panther, size of a linebacker and arm like a cannon, is changing how defenses can be terrorized with his unique combination of running and throwing ability.

Yet despite all that, history tells us the Broncos have the antidote for the Panthers’ potent offense. Carolina led the NFL in scoring and is the 19th team to score over 500 points in a season. It put 24 points on Seattle’s second-ranked defense and destroyed the Cardinals’ No. 5 defense in the NFC title game. This is a team that can score.

But can it score enough to beat the Broncos? Frankly, history tells us not without Manning’s help. If Manning turns the ball over, as he has done more this season than any time in his career, Denver is doomed. But if he plays mistake free and relies on a powerful, two-pronged running game and short passing, his defense will bring him his second Super Bowl trophy.

Denver drilled Tom Brady 23 times two weeks ago, the highest number of in-game assaults on a quarterback in the league this season. Bill Belichick may want to believe his team “had control of the game but not the score” but that is baloney. He had no control over the defense that kept burying his quarterback.

The Broncos finished first in total defense, pass defense and, most importantly as we will see, sacks. It finished third against the run and fourth in scoring defense, allowing only 18.5 points per game. Both of its edge rushers, Ware and Miller, and both of its corners, old friend Aqib Talib and Chris Harris Jr., were Pro Bowl performers — meaning Denver is elite in the two most significant areas of defense in today’s game.

More importantly, they have a speedy linebacker in Danny Trevathan, who likely will spend his day spying Newton. One thing Denver must do to win is keep Newton behind the line of scrimmage because he does as much, if not more, damage running than passing — and Trevathan has the speed to ensure that happens.

There have been 16 top-ranked offenses that have reached the Super Bowl; those teams are 8-8. There have been 15 top-ranked defenses to reach the Super Bowl before this year’s Broncos; they are 11-4. This is not a statistical accident or something that has begun to change in recent years. It is what it is, as someone once said, which is to say a problem for Newton.

In fact, the statistics are even worse for Carolina than they first appear. Of those four losses, two came before the NFL-AFL merger (pre-1970) in games in which each team had the No. 1 defense in its league. Green Bay beat the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl II, and the Kansas City Chiefs dominated the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV. So one could make the case that the No. 1 ranked defense has really only lost twice in the 49-year history of the game, while the No. 1 offense has gone .500.

As for recent history, only one No. 1 defense has gotten to the Super Bowl and lost since the 1982 Miami Dolphins. Since then, seven top-ranked defenses have made the game. They’re 6-1. Who was the only loser? The Seattle Seahawks, who managed to make the worst play call in football history from inside the 1-yard line last year.

Denver has already faced the third and fourth highest scoring offenses in the league during its run to Super Bowl 50. It held the Steelers to one touchdown in a 23-16 victory that left Pittsburgh’s 26.4-point-per-game offense 11.4 points below its norm. It held the Patriots to two touchdowns in a 20-18 victory, 11.1 points below its 29.1 points-per-game average. The Panthers are averaging 31.3 points per game. Denver allowed over 30 points only once this season, so it seems unlikely Carolina will reach that number without a Broncos’ defensive implosion similar to what happened to the Cardinals in a game in which Carson Palmer (six turnovers) had more to do with Carolina’s win than Newton.

If Denver’s defense plays to its norm, Carolina will very likely score fewer than 21 points. That is not a winning formula for the Panthers.

In case you need a tad more convincing, here’s one final stat that casts a shadow on the likelihood of a Panthers coronation tonight. Sacks became an official NFL statistic in 1982. Since that time, 13 Super Bowl teams have arrived with 50 or more sacks. Denver is the 14th. Those teams are 9-4, and in three of the losses both Super Bowl finalists had 50 or more sacks. In other words, a team with 50 or more sacks is 10-1 over the past 24 years unless faced with an opponent equally as adept at sacking the quarterback.

Denver finished this season with 52 sacks. Carolina had 44.

Conclusion? Take the points tonight … and the defense most adept at preventing them.

Not everyone seems to realize it these days, but they have weight classes in boxing for a reason. It’s mostly to avoid charges of assault and battery.

This comes to mind with the recent announcement that middleweight champion Canelo Alvarez has signed to go to the fistic equivalent of the driving range to face former junior welterweight champion Amir Khan.

The idea that Khan, who is barely a welterweight and three years ago was stopped by junior welterweight champion Danny Garcia, is going to face a full-blown middleweight, which Alvarez has become, is laughable. It’s a money grab for Khan and those who allegedly represent him and a big payday for Alvarez without taking any real risk.

It is the classic fight for a young champion on the rise — facing an opponent whose resume appears to be more formidable than his actual skills.

Some will say Khan can punch. They have not been paying much attention lately. Khan has one knockout victory the past five-plus years, a stoppage of well-worn Zab Judah on July 23, 2011. Technically, Carlos Molina retired on his stool after 10 rounds on Dec. 15, 2012 but it was obvious Khan couldn’t have stopped him with a machine gun. So what, exactly, is he going to do with the far stronger, younger and more talented Alvarez, who is coming off a lopsided points victory over Miguel Cotto, winning 10-of-12 rounds?

The Khan-Alvarez will be contested at 155 pounds to give the illusion it is a fair fight, but Alvarez will weigh far more than that by fight night. Khan will not only be the smaller man but the more chin challenged and less skilled. Other than that, promoter Oscar De La Hoya has made a hell of a match. Truth be told, by boxing standards he has made a hell of a match. He’s sacrificing yesterday’s news to elevate his No. 1 draw.

He’s also handing Alvarez (46-1-1, 32 KOs) a high-quality tuneup for his expected showdown with unbeaten Gennady Golovkin sometime this fall. That will be a legitimate fight among equals, at least on paper. This is not.

So what’s in it for Khan (31-3, 19 KOs)?

Other than a few more bucks, it beats me. . . . As it will Khan on fight night, probably half to death.

Golovkin busy too

Golovkin wasted no time scheduling his own tuneup, announcing he’ll face mandatory challenger Dominic Wade April 23 at the Forum in Inglewood, Calif.

If Golovkin had his druthers, which he did not, he would have gone straight to Alvarez on May 7, but Alvarez is the bigger pay-per-view star and calls the shots. His call was for each to have an interim fight before cashing in. Neither is facing much of a challenge, although it’s difficult to say for sure which champion has the easier road to their ultimate showdown. But Golovkin, (34-0, 31 KOs) can at least argue he’s facing another sacrificial lamb because it’s mandatory that he do so.

Golovkin registered three knockouts in 2015 on his way to being named Fighter of the Year. It seems unlikely Wade (18-0, 12 KOs) will find a way to avoid becoming the first this year. Although the Maryland native said he views this as a great opportunity which presumes he believes there’s an opportunity to win.

Which there is not.

WBA upholds vow

It’s not often one writes that one of the sanctioning organizations is doing what it should be doing and what it said it would do. But of late it appears the WBA is doing just that.

WBA president Gilberto Mendoza Jr. recently promised to get rid of all the “interim” champions “super” champions and “regular” champions dotting his ratings and return to what fight fans want: one real champion per weight class.

In an effort to keep the sanctioning fees coming, the WBA began to name more and more champions in recent years. For some reason, Mendoza recently has reversed field on that long-held WBA process, perhaps in reaction to the enlightened regime of new WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman, who has begun to remake the WBC and is becoming a beacon of common sense in the often illogical world of boxing.

Mendoza has begun to force the organization’s many “champions” to face off or move on, recently ordering junior lightweight “super” titleholder Takashi Uchiyama (24-0-1, 20 KOs) and “regular” titlist Javier Fortuna (29-0-1, 21 KOs), to face each other with the winner fighting interim champion Jezreel Corrales (19-1, 7 KOs), after which they’d only need one belt to hold up the division.

Same is true in the bantamweight division, where “super” champion Juan Carlos Payano (17-0, 8 KOs) was ordered to face “regular” champion Jamie McDonnell (27-2-1, 12 KOs). The winner will then face interim titlist Zhanat Zhakiyanov (26-1, 18 KOs) and clean up the division.

This is a good thing, but it will only truly mean something if Mendoza continues to do it until the WBA has only one champion in each weight class.

Short jabs

Boxing lost an old friend and onetime top trainer when Richie Giachetti died Feb. 3 at the age of 76. Giachetti was best known for his work with Larry Holmes, whom he trained for the bulk of his career and brought to the forefront of the heavyweight division. He was also in Mike Tyson’s corner for the infamous “Ear Bite Fight” with Evander Holyfield and worked with Aaron Pryor, Esteban De Jesus, Earnie Shavers, Riddick Bowe, Buster Douglas, Michael Dokes, Greg Page, Jean-Marc Mormeck, Steve Cunningham and Julian Jackson, among others. But he will be best remembered for his many years in Holmes’ corner. He was there when Holmes first won the WBC title in a rousing 15-round battle with Ken Norton and was still there when Holmes finally lost to Michael Spinks in 1985. He was Holmes’ loyal liege, which is a proper epitaph. . . .

Young super middleweight contender Gilberto Ramirez will have a chance to make boxing history April 9 when he tries to become the first Mexican boxer to win the 168-pound world title. He’ll challenge Germany’s Arthur Abraham on the undercard of the Manny Pacquiao-Timothy Bradley welterweight title fight in Las Vegas. The undefeated Ramirez (33-0, 24 KOs) is Abraham’s mandatory challenger. Abraham (44-4, 29 KO) is a former middleweight champion and two-time super middleweight champion who has made five successful defenses in his latest championship reign. Abraham has had nearly as many world title fights (24) as Ramierz has total fights. . . .

He may not be quite what his father was, but Chris Eubanks Jr. (21-1, 16 KOs) will get a chance to become at least a British Commonwealth champion when he challenges NickBlackwell (19-3-1, 8 KOs) March 26 at Wembley Arena in London. Eubank won the right to challenge WBA middleweight champion Daniel Jacobs last December when he stopped Gary“Spike” O’Sullivan but opted to face Blackwell instead. . . .

It should come as no surprise that the Russian media got it wrong when it reported Roy Jones Jr. had retired after suffering the fifth KO loss of his career against Enzo Maccarinelli in Moscow in December. Word out of Jones’ camp is the 47-year-old former multi-division champion will likely fight at least once more in a farewell match in his hometown of Pensacola, Fla. That can’t come soon enough because Jones is on the way to permanent damage if he hasn’t already suffered it. . . .

Leave it to the traveling man to step in vs. hot young heavyweight Luis Ortiz. Two-time heavyweight championship challenger Tony Thompson has agreed to face Ortiz March 5 at the DC Armory in Washington, Thompson’s hometown. That’s a switch for the 44-year-old Thompson, who has fought seven of his last eight fights outside the United States, competing in Turkey, Germany, France, England and Switzerland. . . 

Newly crowned IBF heavyweight champion Charles Martin said he wants a piece of hot British prospect Anthony Joshua. Martin (23-0-1, 21 KOs) won the vacated title when Vyacheslav Glazkov injured his knee and had to retire. Now he wants Joshua (15-0, 15 KOs) for his first defense and is willing to do it April 9 in London. Joshua is set to fight that night at the O2 Arena, but doesn’t yet have an opponent. The fight makes sense for both of them, two untested guys with much to win and little to lose. . . .

The Mohegan Sun gets a big show March 12 when former three-division champion Abner Mares faces Fernando Montiel. Each is coming off a featherweight title fight loss. . . .

Super middleweight contender Andre Dirrell grew up in Flint, Mich., the troubled city in which the water system was contaminated due to governmental incompetence. He’s donated significant money to help pay for bottled water and is trying to get other fighters to contribute. Last month, President Barack Obama declared a federal emergency in Flint after its water supply was contaminated with toxic levels of lead after its source was changed from Lake Huron to the Flint River in 2014 to save money. More than 100,000 people have been poisoned. . . 

Unified light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev’s recent one-sided win over Jean Pascal in Montreal averaged 1.179 million viewers on HBO and peaked at 1.269 million. Kovalev is becoming one of HBO’s most popular fighters. . . .

Remember 1970s middleweight contender Eugene“Cyclone” Hart, who was a classic Philly fighter? His son, Jesse, is a super middleweight prospect (19-0, 16 KOs) who will fight the main event vs. Dashon Johnson (19-18-3, 6 KOs) March 18 at the 2300 Arena in Philadelphia, following in his father’s footsteps.

Don’t do it Danny! Do not do it!

Don’t fall for the NBA okey-doke. Don’t believe the hype. Don’t listen to the noise.

Do not trade those No. 1 picks, especially the one this year from Brooklyn that has about a 98 percent chance of being a top-five pick and nearly a 50 percent chance of being in the top three for some 30-year-old guy who has never led a team anywhere. Do not do it.

The Celtics’ recent resurgence has some folks whose wardrobe is mostly green-and-white and who often have the names of grown men other than themselves on their backs beginning to think silly thoughts. They want to believe these Celtics are a player or so away from another banner-hanging team.

Danny, you know this is not true.

You know the way to return the Celtics to a semblance of what they once were is to continue to build one brick at a time. Build the way the Golden State Warriors did it. Build through the draft and then fill in the rest via free agency.

You’ve already made several trades that have gotten the Celtics this far, which is to say into the illusion of being a contender when you really know they’re not. Don’t get desperate now.

At the moment the Celtics are 32-23, the third seed in the Eastern Conference and 4.5 games behind the Toronto Raptors in the Atlantic Division. Barely a month ago they were the ninth seed and on the outside looking in. A few games go in the opposite direction and they’d still be in that position. As improved as this young group has been lately under Brad Stevens, and as fun as they are to watch because they come to play every night, they’re not one big man away from anything but going backwards.

The rumors are swirling now, as they always do in the final days before the trade deadline. The names are out there and yours is in the middle of every discussion whether you’re actually in those discussions or not.

Dwight Howard.

Al Horford.

Blake Griffin.

Give up the picks that can transform a franchise and one of them can be yours. But let’s be real, Danny. What have those guys ever won?

Howard was a great defensive player and rebounder in Orlando but he’s been with three teams that never raised a banner and will be 31 next December. After 12 years pounding his legs up and down NBA floors, there’s a lot of tread wear on Dwight Howard’s body and no rings on his fingers. He allegedly wants a $30 million a year max deal and do you really believe he fits the blue-collar scrappiness that is so much a part of this team you’ve built?

I think not.

And what of Horford? Talented guy but his ring collection presently consists of an empty space. Nine years in the NBA and he hasn’t won anything and neither has his team. That’s not all his fault, but is he a cornerstone of big things to come in Boston?

Not if you have to shell out the most valuable picks you hold. You’ve been carrying all these “assets” around for years, building toward this moment. Don’t get jiggy now, Danny.

Short-term fixes are fine if you’re one guy away from making some noise. But do you really believe the noise? Do you really believe your team is as good as it’s played the last month? More importantly, is it a player away from winning the Eastern Conference from LeBron’s Cavs?

I didn’t think so.

As far as Blake Griffin goes, he’s 26 and has much upside. But in six years with the Clippers, he hasn’t won anything either. And now that Doc Rivers has them moving in the right direction, does it not make you wonder why Doc might entertain trading Griffin?

Sure there’s always contract considerations. There’s always a player’s ability to walk out. But really, if Doc thought Griffin was going to help take the Clippers to the top, would he even be talking to other teams about sending him packing?

Maybe he would in the hopes somebody with an itchy trigger finger blinks at the wrong time and overpays, but Danny you’ve said all along you’re more patient than the Dalai Lama. Job has nothing on you, you’ve always insisted. You’re not afraid to make moves but you don’t do it just to do it.

Last year you were the Branch Rickey of basketball. What you got out of all that was some talent and an All-Star in Isaiah Thomas as the valuable high picks kept piling up. So don’t blink now, Danny.

Let Brad Stevens accomplish all he can with the guys he has. They may take us all farther than we think, and if they don’t, wherever they take us will be a fun ride. When it’s over, hopefully you’ll still have that pick from Brooklyn near the top of the draft, another in 2018 and the right to swap drafting slots with the Nets next year, plus an inviting young team with a smart young coach more than a few veteran free agents might find attractive.

What you won’t have is some 30-year-old guy with aching knees who thinks he’s worth $30 million a year and knows he’s the show but hasn’t won a damn thing. And that would be a good thing.

So don’t do it Danny. I’m beggin’ ya.

Less than a year ago, there was wide-ranging insistence that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was on his last legs. He was, many pundits and fans insisted, incompetent, clueless and at odds with various powerful owners like the Patriots’ Bob Kraft. Well, we should all hope one day to be in such a predicament.

At the end of that troubled 2014 season, the one punctuated by the missteps and dishonorable moments that went with Ray Rice, Greg Hardy, Adrian Peterson, domestic-violence policies and Deflategate, a clearly subdued Goodell said, during his State of the NFL address at the Super Bowl: “It’s been a tough year on me personally. It’s been a year of humility and learning. We obviously as an organization have gone through adversity. It’s an opportunity to get better. It’s an opportunity for our organization to get better. So we’ve all done a lot of soul searching, starting with yours truly.”

Many NFL observers kept insisting this or that was the last straw. Goodell had lost powerful members of his constituency, they said. One minute they said it was Kraft. Next it was small-market owners like Jim Irsay in Indianapolis. Then it was the big cheeses like Jerry Jones. Empty boxes were being sent to his office to help him pack.

Then the truth came out this week. It was true! They cut his pay!

Sure they did.

In 2014, which will be the last time you ever publicly hear what Roger Goodell is being paid because the NFL office finally got called on their phony claim of being a “non-profit” operation for tax purposes, those angry owners on the Compensation Committee (Kraft, Atlanta’s Arthur Blank and the Panthers’ Jerry Richardson, Hardy’s former employer) awarded Goodell total compensation of $34.1 million, including $26.5 million in bonuses, $3.7 million in pension benefits and $273,000 in “other” compensation, which one hopes included paying for his personal copy of the CBA and someone to explain it to him.

That was down a million bucks from the year before and $8.2 million down from 2012, but well above his nine-year average compensation despite many embarrassing moments and repeatedly losing wrestling matches with labor law during the past year. Where do I sign up for that kind of rebuke?

The NFL’s 32 owners have paid Goodell a yearly average of $20 million and a total compensation of $180.5 million. One can only hope your bosses get so angry with you they just slap the compensation ceiling on you at $20 million per year. Take that, mister!

Last year the NFL reportedly grossed $11 billion. That’s a lot of zeros and because there’s so many none of those owners, including Kraft, can stay mad at good old Roger for long.

Deflategate vs. $11 billion in revenue? What do you think Kraft would choose?

Lost No. 1 pick vs. $11 billion? Please take two picks.

Goodell may have blown every encounter he had with the disciplinary side of the CBA, but the fact is it’s a one-sided document that leans heavily in favor of his 32 bosses. Win for Roger.

Under his leadership, the owners dodged all responsibility for the concussion plague that keeps rearing its ugly head whenever another former player dies and allows an autopsy to be performed on his brain. Goodell and his minions worked out a settlement on an issue some felt could end up costing the owners not only billions but also their game’s place in the public consciousness for a cost per owner of between $25 million and $30 million. Chump change.

More remarkably, they also never had to admit liability or culpability when anyone who has been paying attention knows all those aging players committing suicide or getting ALS at rates far more frequent than the general population are in those sad circumstances because of how they were treated — or not treated — by the powers that be in the NFL.

Goodell also has sold the general public a pound of baloney about how much things have changed and how hard the league is working to come up with solutions to what may be an unsolvable problem. Look, he says, we paid General Electric $10 million just to work on concussion research in 2014. What he doesn’t tell you is that’s $3.1 million less than the league spent on rent for its offices on Park Avenue. Priorities? Room with a view over view of broken brains.

Despite the mounting evidence that football is one of the most dangerous endeavors in sports, Goodell said at this year’s annual State of the NFL that he played football through high school and would want his sons to do the same. Just for good measure he added, “There is risk in life. There is risk sitting on the couch.”

There is risk sitting on the couch, but it’s generally not brain damage. Where there is no risk is sitting in the Park Avenue seat occupied by Roger Goodell. His paystub in 2014 made that clear.

You can launch all the Twitter attacks you want in his direction. You can write angry letters to Bob Kraft or vent on talk radio until you’re blue in the face. It won’t matter. Not as long as Roger Goodell and his administration make it rain green for those owners, because in the end you may be deflated by the way he operates, but Kraft and his peers are not.

TV ratings are up and he’s convinced the football-watching world gambling on fantasy football is not really gambling even though you’re betting on the unpredictable performances of individual players and losing each week to professional gamblers who know how to work algorithms. He just got NBC to fork over $450 million to broadcast half of the worst night of football games of the week, renewed a DirecTV deal paying $1.5 billion a year and replaced Motorola as a league sponsor with Bose. Is Motorola still in business?

CBS and NFL Network had “Thursday Night Football” to themselves. Now they get to share the pain with NBC while the league doubled its money. When’s the last time you saw a good game on Thursday night?

No matter. The owners have a team-friendly CBA for five more years, Goodell is about to hammer out a money-making deal on streaming video (Can you say, “The NFL on Netflix!”?) and the cash is rolling in.

Deflategate? What’s that got to do with anything?

The Celtics are coached by Brad Stevens, but they could just as easily be run by Abraham Maslow for they are a team approaching self-actualization. Whether they reach it or not, watching them try is what makes them interesting.

Maslow was not an X’s and O’s man. He was a psychologist best known for creating the Hierarchy of Needs — which, if properly followed, lead to one’s full potential through a grasp of the world as it is, not as you wish it to be. If these Celtics are to reach whatever their full potential might be, they must do just that.

See their world as it is, which for the most part is what they’ve been doing this season. As the Celtics showed last night, they are a scrappy team whose margin of error is razor thin. It is why they are fun to watch.

It is also why we won’t be watching them for as long as we might like this season.

At times in last night’s 112-107 win over Milwaukee, they led by as many as 18 points, running the Bucks into the ground. They harassed them on defense and beat them down the floor time and again on offense.

They were the Celtics when everything is going right. A little undersized and a little under talented, they make up with effort (which is admirable) and with defense (which until eight games ago was withering). They are fun to watch in part because their shortcomings are obvious, and the struggle to overcome them is one we all know in life.

There are only a few LeBrons in the world. The rest of us are Avery Bradley or Jared Sullinger. We’ve got some upside and we’ve got some downside and the fight to excel, and at times just to survive, is ongoing. If you wear Celtic green on game nights, you live with this. Like them, you live on the edge.

That’s why you looked up last night and all of a sudden that 18-point third-quarter lead was down to four. How’d that happen? The way it can so quickly when the Celtics stop running, or take a few deep breaths on defense, or let their opponent’s superior athleticism/size/skills overtake them.

There are limits to how far such a team can go, and even the most loyal green teamer can see that almost every night. Last night. The scrambling defense and the lack of interior defense. The fast break and the lack of a reliable superstar to take over when things are slipping away.

You can ignore their flaws much of the time because these kids play hard and, not too often, like most NBA teams. Most of the time they don’t start going one-on-one and forgetting their teammates exist. Most of the time, they remember that for them, working hard on the defense is essential to survival. In the moments when they forget, as they did at times last night, they are doomed — and are the first to admit it, which is another admirable trait.

Through the first 51 games of the season, they were among the best defensive teams in the NBA, allowing 100.3 points per game. In the last eight, they’ve given up 111.3. When they’re the former team they’re in the thick of the Eastern Conference playoff hunt. When they’re the latter, they’re calling for tee times in May.

They can be beaten by better athletes or by more size, and in the playoffs we all know that will eventually get them. The proof of that is right in front of you because, as much as the talk has been about how well the Celtics have been doing this season, the third seed in the Eastern Conference at the moment is only a four-game losing streak from being out of the playoffs.

That is concerning, but it is also what makes them fun. With 2:30 to play in the second quarter, the Bucks had clawed their way back to within six and you began to wonder. Which Celtics team was going to emerge?

In those final two minutes it was the one that’s been making you believe in miracles, the one that ran and defended and pushed until the lead was back up to 11. By the start of the fourth quarter, it was 15.

Then, boom, it shrunk back to four with 1:12 to play and the real struggle was on. On this night the Celtics were what they needed to be at that moment, and what you turn on the television hoping they will be. They were not great but they were tough. They held on.

Are they going to hang another banner up this June at the Garden? Not a championship one.

But if there’s one for self-actualization, they may have earned it.

The punch you don’t see coming, they say, is the one that takes you out. The latest to learn that is WBA welterweight champion Keith Thurman, whose scheduled fight with former champion and longtime rival Shawn Porter was stopped cold before it started because sometimes a punch in the face can come from unexpected sources.

Mohegan Sun was ready to play host to the much anticipated welterweight title bout March 12, only to see it slip away when Thurman was injured in a car accident last week. Ironically, what knocked Thurman out was not a punch from a sparring partner but from an air bag. According to promoter Lou DiBella, Thurman said his car’s air bag hit him in the face harder than any punch he ever received in the ring.

Thurman initially hoped to honor his commitment, but after subsequently sparring, his neck and shoulders were so sore doctors recommended he take off several weeks. This likely delays Thurman-Porter until mid- to late-spring at the earliest.

The undefeated Thurman (26-0, 22 KOs) is known as “One Time” because, he claims, he has to hit you just one time to knock you out. That’s often proven to be the case, but maybe that air bag should share the name?

The fight was so heavily anticipated it was to be televised in prime time by CBS. It would have been the first prime-time boxing show on the network since Feb. 15, 1978, when Muhammad Ali was upset in stunning fashion by Olympic gold medalist Leon Spinks.

The postponement was as disappointing to Porter (26-1-1, 16 KOs) as it was to CBS. Porter won the IBF welterweight title in a significant upset of Devon Alexander in 2013 before losing it to Kell Brook in 2014. Alexander has won twice since, including an upset of former junior welterweight champion Adrien Broner last June.

This Thurman fight was particularly anticipated by Porter’s father Ken, who trains his son, because of his own long association with Thurman dating back to when both were competitive amateurs.

“It is and isn’t personal,” Shawn Porter said. “For Keith to be considered one of the top dogs in this weight class, it is personal to me to beat him and reign over him. Other than that, it’s all business.”

Same is true for his father. Sort of.

“I know (Thurman) very well,” Ken Porter said. “I’ve had opportunities to work with him in the amateurs. I’ve had opportunities to work with him in the pros. I’ve worked in his corner in an amateur fight before, I’ve worked in his corner in a pro fight. Keith knows Shawn. They’ve sparred about 30 rounds.

“I would challenge (Thurman) to come in the ring and fight. We’re looking forward to trading punches, boxing with him, slugging with him. We’re looking for a fight.”

Their longtime relationship and concussive power is a large part of what made this (now delayed) fight much anticipated.

Pros in Olympics?

The long-anticipated threat to add professional prizefighters to the Olympics came a step closer to becoming reality in Rio this summer now that the International Boxing Association discussed at its meetings in Manchester, England, last week a fast-track proposal to open Olympic tournaments to all boxers. Organization president Ching-Kuo Wu said the proposal could be ratified in time for the Rio Games in August.

Mike Martino, the executive director of USA Boxing, told The Associated Press that he doesn’t, however, anticipate any American professionals joining the U.S. team even if approved.

“We’ve talked to the USOC about how it (positively) impacts the sport, and it’s huge,” Martino said. “‘ The Dream Team’ changed basketball in the Olympics forever. This will obviously change boxing forever.”

The question is would high-profile champions such as Floyd Mayweather Jr. or Manny Pacquiao ever consider taking such a risk? It seems unlikely but lesser stars and experienced younger professionals might.

Wu, for one, doesn’t see much of an issue with the idea.

“When I took over the presidency in 2006,” he said, “I made it very clear the term of ‘amateur’ is not really relevant because when you look now at all the Olympic sports, who is really amateur?”
No one could argue with that.

Belts still missing

Despite the proliferation of world title belts, boxing would dearly love to have six more surface in Canastota, N.Y.

The International Hall of Fame continues offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the return of six world championship belts stolen from the museum last November. It was the first burglary in the Hall’s 25-year history.

Four of the belts belonged to Carmen Basilio and two to Tony Zale. In addition to the cash reward, ex-heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, a boxing historian himself, is offering a signed boxing glove, a signed copy of his book “Undisputed Truth” and a signed Roots of Fight T-shirt for any information leading to their return.

The loss of Basilio’s belts is particularly painful because the Canastota native’s career inspired the formation of the Hall. He was a member of the original class of inductees. He is still there, of course, but the belts he fought so hard to win are not. Anyone with information about the missing belts should call Canastota Police at 315-697-2240.

Short jabs

Pacquiao’s controversial recent remarks on same sex marriage cost him his Nike endorsement deal, but the Filipino star is negotiating with Under Armour and several other sports apparel companies. Nike cut ties with the eight-time world champion Feb. 17 after he described gay couples as “worse than animals.” Nike termed his remarks “abhorrent.” Pacquiao, a strict Catholic, did issue an apology for his insensitive remarks. . . .

Four-division world champion Juan Manuel Marquez is returning to boxing at the age of 42 after a two-year layoff due to a knee injury. Promoter Bob Arum said Marquez (56-7-1, 40 KOs), one of Mexico’s all-time greatest fighters, wants a tuneup fight and then a match with Miguel Cotto. Supposedly Marquez doesn’t need the money and his place in boxing history is secure so what’s the point? . . .

At the other end of the boxing spectrum, top welterweight prospect Errol Spence Jr. is stepping up considerably in class April 16 when he faces former junior welterweight champion Chris Algieri (21-2, 8 KOs) at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, in an NBC prime-time fight. Algieri is not only a former world champion but went the distance (albeit being knocked down six times in the process) with Pacquiao and nearly upset Amir Khan last year. Algieri has vastly more big fight experience than Spence (19-0, 16 KOs), but his absence of punching power, as evidenced by having only eight knockouts, makes him a relatively safe choice for Spence . . .

Lucas Browne will try to become the first Australian to win any portion of the heavyweight title when he faces WBA “champion” Ruslan Chagaev March 5 in Grozny, Russia. Tyson Fury is the true WBA champion, but that organization has so many sets of belts in each division it could open a Men’s Wearhouse. Chagaev (34-2-1, 21 KOs) owns one of those lesser titles and Browne (23-0, 20 KOs) is anxious to get it, even though he knows the real heavyweight champions are Fury and Deontay Wilder. . . 

If you’re anxious to get an early glimpse at two young prospects, check out undefeated junior welterweight Sergey Lipinets (8-0, 6 KOs) and featherweight Tugstsogt Nyambayar (4-0, 4 KOs) when they appear March 15 on Fox Deportes. Lipinets faces once-beaten Levan Ghvamichava (16-1-1, 12 KOs) in the main event while Nyambayar, the 2012 Olympic silver medalist, faces Rafael Vazquez (16-2, 13 KOs). Lipinets began his pro career with six straight knockouts before outpointing previously unbeaten Lydell Rhodes last October, while Ghvamichava is trying to make Lipinets the third undefeated fighter whose record he blemishes, having already handed Jonathan Garcia and Chris Singleton their first losses. Nyambayar won the silver medal at the 2012 London Games, but did not turn pro until last year. . . .

The Germans are at it again.Last weekend in Oberhausen, Germany, Felix Sturm was judged to have won his fifth world title by majority decision, beating Fedor Chudinov in a fight he didn’t come close to winning. Chudinov (14-1, 10 KOs) defeated Sturm (40-5-3, 18 KOs) in May to win a vacant title in Frankfort but made the mistake of testing fate and returning to Germany for a rematch. Notorious for horrid decisions favoring the local hero, judges in Germany handed Sturm another title by two thin points although CompuBox figures report he was outpunched 1,022- 605 and outlanded 297-184. Chudinov was by far the heavier puncher but that didn’t matter either. Very likely neither will the rematch clause Chudinov holds because that fight also must be fought in Germany. . . .

The news remains grim for Prichard Colon, the 23-year-old fighter who collapsed in his dressing room Oct. 17 from traumatic brain injuries suffered in a ninth-round disqualification loss to Terrel Williams. The foul-filled fight was televised on NBC. Colon has been in a coma since that night. He underwent recent spinal surgery to administer a drug that hopefully will loosen the muscles around his spine. Colon was hit behind the head with rabbit punches a number of times before the bout was stopped.

The reaction to Pablo Sandoval’s girth upon his arrival in Fort Myers last week has been, fittingly perhaps, heavy. It’s also been ridiculous. If you hire a fat guy and hand him $95 million, what do you think he’s going to turn into? Evander Holyfield?

About the only truly honest statement about the man, his condition and the Red Sox’ knowledge of it came from president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski. Dombrowski, manager John Farrell and owner John Henry will probably have to visit a chiropractor after bending themselves into a pretzel last week trying to convince the populace that a guy nicknamed Panda was actually as fit as a devotee of the Insanity workout, but at one point Dombrowski raised a valid point when he said: “He’s got one of those bodies — they call him Panda for a reason.”

In other words, Pablo Sandoval was fat when he was a World Series MVP for the San Francisco Giants, he was fat when he helped them win three World Series, he was fat when the Giants matched the Sox $95 million offer, and he’s fat now. Acting outraged, as so many in the media tried to be this week when they first saw the size of his gut, was as phony of the claim his body fat is 17 percent.

The media, it seems, was shocked. Shocked about what? That a fat guy at 26, 27 and 28 years old is still fat at 29?

Certainly Sandoval was a big disappointment when he put up the worst numbers of his major league career after scoring the best ones — $95 million guaranteed for five seasons — in his contract negotiation with the Sox last season. He showed up big but not during games, hitting just .245 with a .658 OPS with defensive range at third base that made Hanley Ramirez look like Willie Mays by comparison in left field. Of more concern, for the fourth straight season both Sandoval’s on-base percentage and slugging percentage sagged.

But, really, what did Red Sox management expect? That’s usually what happens to professional athletes who are habitually overweight. They fade fast, even if the number crunchers in Geekland don’t see it coming because they’re too busy coming up with an algorithm to prove they’re smarter than guys who scout with their eyes rather than a high-speed computer.

So a guy called Panda shows up looking like a panda and the reaction is “outrage?” Outrage over what? A fat guy being fat?

As often happens with the Red Sox, part of the problem is nobody stayed on message. Farrell and Dombrowski said they’d been monitoring Sandoval and were pleased with his work ethic. Fine, but his work ethic has never been his problem. It’s his food addiction that’s the problem, but that’s not his fault. Nor is it going away.

They also said they’d spoken with him at the end of last year about the need to lose weight, although Farrell later said nobody actually said “lose weight.” That was obvious.

Then Sandoval shows up and says nobody told him to lose a pound. What followed were several days of unflattering pictures of his belly protruding out of his T-shirt and a front page story in one paper offering nutritional suggestions for dietary changes. Steamed vegetables? Right!

Sandoval’s insistence that no one told him to lose weight struck me as simply the embarrassed reaction of many folks who struggle with weight control. Denial is as popular on their menu as a dozen donuts and a 32-ounce Frappuccino.

We all know someone like poor Pablo. The person who orders a salad and Diet Coke then puts 16 ounces of salad dressing on the veggies and eats half a loaf of French bread. What seems obvious is Sandoval has an eating disorder. Maybe it’s that he eats the wrong things or at the wrong times. Certainly working the 4-to-midnight shift nearly every night from April to October doesn’t help.

Sandoval claims his body fat went from 23 percent last year down to 17 percent, a number confirmed by the Red Sox. If true he would be considered fit, which he well may be. Frankly, 17 percent makes him an average American 30-year-old male. The problem is do you really want your $95 million third baseman to be an average American 30-year-old male?

Whatever the truth may be, the scorn heaped on Sandoval, while understandable, seemed utterly unfair. It was the same when the Sox brought in Manny Ramirez. As long as he was one of the best hitters of his time his odd, sometimes disinterested approach was tolerated. When he didn’t, they ran him out of town. For what? He was “Manny being Manny” from the beginning.

It’s the same with Sandoval. If he hits and fields as well as he did with the Giants, he’s Panda and it’s a lovefest. If he doesn’t, he’s fat. The truth is he’s never changed.

As Dombrowski said: “It’s not like he left Oct. 1 and we didn’t see him until he arrived. We’d been seeing him on a regular basis. And I’ll say that even from my own perspective yesterday, even when I saw him — and I saw him when he walked in — I didn’t have any concerns whatsoever. He looked the same to me.”

Yes he did. He wasn’t wearing size 32 jeans when the Sox signed him folks so why knock him now for appearing as he did the day he first arrived?

There have been any number of athletes who ate their way out of a job. Sandoval is headed toward being the next but who knows? He’s the same guy he was last year, but he’s also the same guy he was when he led the Giants to World Series victories. He had a weight problem then and he’s got one now and, unfortunately, he’ll very likely have one until it cuts his life short.

It’s legit to feel sad for him but outraged? Why?

As the great philosopher Mike Tyson once put it, “A leopard don’t change his stripes.”

Tyson may have fractured the analogy but something similar applies here. A guy called Panda is never going to be called Slim. If that bothers you, don’t blame him. Blame the geniuses on Yawkey Way who convinced themselves you lose weight as you age, especially after someone pays you enough money not to buy groceries but to buy a grocery store.