We aren’t supposed to trust our gut anymore. We aren’t supposed to rely on our instincts. That’s true if your best pitcher is throwing a two-hit shutout in a World Series elimination game. It’s true at the track if you happen to like a 50-to-1 shot just because he’s got a gray coat. It’s true when you pick a stock. Or a Sunday best bet.

We have numbers and hard figures to make these decisions for us now. It used to be charming when a football coach would go for it on fourth down with no other evidence to back up the wisdom of the call than “a hunch” and 80,000 people pleading “GO FOR IT!” It used to be a great tale when a hard-bitten baseball scout picked a player because of his “moxie.”

Hunches and gut instinct are out. Stone-cold facts are in. Got it.

I’m going with a hunch here. I’m going on instinct.

I think Joe Judge is a hell of a football coach.

And I think by the time he’s done he’ll be invited into the VIP room of Giants coaches that features Steve Owen and Jim Lee Howell, Bill Parcells and Tom Coughlin. He will be allowed to bypass the basement (the “Handley Holding Cell”) in which we have tossed the tattered résumés of Bill Arnsparger and John McVay, Ben McAdoo and Pat Shurmur. And he’ll steer clear of the waiting room where the likes of Jim Fassel and Allie Sherman and Dan Reeves and Ray Perkins can debate their uneven legacies.

It is early in the game to say this. Judge is 1-7 so far. He has shown a wonderful ability to have his team perfectly prepared week after week, and shown less proficiency at figuring out how to win winnable games, how to close out fourth quarters.

But sometimes the eye test still matters.

And what you see from Judge, even at the tender age of 38, even with only eight games under his belt and a winning percentage of .125 to his credit, is an old-school, old-soul coach who has taken advantage of his regular proximity to Bill Belichick and Nick Saban the last 11 years. That doesn’t rub off on everyone. With Judge, it seems to have taken root.

“I’m conscious that my decisions will always be looked at throughout the building,” Judge said Thursday. “The biggest thing I have to do is be consistent in the decisions I make based on the circumstances involved. We have team rules that are clearly laid out to our players. There is not a lot of gray area in anything we do as a program.”

From the start, Judge had one inherent asset that is impossible to teach: a quiet but palpable belief in what he’s doing, and who he is. At its worse, this can come across like someone who likes being the most clever kid in class (think Eric Mangini or Josh McDaniels, two other branches of the Belichick Oak). At its best it is a subtle and constant self-esteem that is apparent in how a coach carries himself, the things he says, what he believes.

Judge has already shown the no-nonsense chapter of himself, keeping Golden Tate home from practice Wednesday for being too chatty, demoting Andrew Thomas for a bit for breaking team rules, refusing to let any of that circulate in the public domain. But there have been plenty of martinet coaches, plenty of guys who think handing out fines and yelling in locker rooms earn them their coaching bones.

But Judge also has shown, quickly, that he can also be a guy his players can trust. His role in the feel-good story about Logan Ryan, Ryan’s wife and the Giants’ training staff is one he didn’t really want to dwell on but it does exemplify the level of faith he has already established with his players, always a tricky thing for a young coach to figure out.

“We’re very demanding of our players,” Judge said. “I don’t apologize for that. I’m not going to apologize for that. I’m very critical of our guys and I’m very blunt and honest with them.

“But at the same time, if you generally care about the players you’re coaching, then you can coach them hard and you can be critical, because they understand at the end of the day that you’re coming from a genuine place and you’re being sincere to try and help them.”

That’s a 38-year-old rookie sounding an awful lot like a 58-year-old who’s lapped the block a time or 10. Now look, eventually .125 has to become .500, and .500 has to become something even better, or he will be as so many coaches become: a quickly forgotten footnote. He is no sure thing.

But he sure looks the part. He sure makes you want to remember that Parcells was 3-12-1 his first year as a head coach, looking lost and overmatched and overwhelmed across every week. It sure seems like he’s going to figure it out, and in a big way, when he has players at his disposal to make it all so.

No analytics to back that up right now. Just a hunch. Just a gut instinct. Just an eye test passed with flying colors, week after week.