Change, we’re told, is an essential good because it’s married to progress. Imagine the ABC Barbara Walters prime-time exclusive with the first Salem witch to beat the heat.

Sports? Different story. Change often becomes a matter of increasing compromises. If there’s anything left beneath your dignity (or in your wallet), be prepared to remove it or get out.

Last week two large local sports figures underwent change.

Tom Coughlin, 20 years an NFL head coach, the past 12 with the Giants, wasn’t exactly fired, didn’t exactly resign. The ambiguity was intentional as if a tenant’s decision not to renew his lease coincided with the owners’ decision not to renew it. We get it. No hard feelings.

Next, a Met, Mike Piazza, slugger in the sudden-slugger steroid era, was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

In Coughlin’s case, his choices seemed limited to those voices demanding that he “change” with the game, a practical-sounding suggestion that roughly meant he learn to indulge the increasing unprofessionalism of professionals and defend or ignore their illogical behavior — even if such pandering and neglect cost his team wins.

In other words, unless Coughlin had lost his senses, 50 years in the forming, to the forces of pop culture, we knew that his defense of Odell Beckham Jr. after Beckham decided he was the only man who mattered during that cataclysmic loss to Carolina — an obscenity topped Saturday night before, then throughout Steelers versus Bengals (FOX’s Joe Buck, during Sunday’s Packers-Redskins, briefly but wisely tethered both significant “games,” 21 days apart, as outstandingly senseless) — was hollow and pathetic. Coughlin had to have been sickened by Beckham’s behavior as both defended team-defeating behavior with the illogical rationalizations of modernity.

Wonder what might have happened had Coughlin not changed to meet the growing “needs” of players, most, likely as a matter of fraud, college men.

What if Coughlin, backed by Giants’ ownership, had insisted that no player moved to lose 15 yards, let alone a game, to misconduct, was welcomed to become a Giant? What if the Giants had been the one team that demanded its players celebrate TDs only as a team — the scorer, perhaps, pointing to the offensive line, as opposed to himself — and TV-taught acts of rank immodesty such as dancing and chest-pounding, be banned as anathema to a team game and goal?

What if the Giants, under Coughlin, had not compromised; had become the one team that would never lose a game as per Dec. 20’s to the Panthers or as the Bengals did, two nights ago?

In response, how many players would declare, “I could never play for the Giants; I’m too selfish.” Or, “I play too dirty; I’m too undisciplined for them.” Wouldn’t it be better to know before than too late?

Imagine, in this wincingly compromised age, being able to root for a team without compromise, without loss of dignity. Shucks, such a team might even lead the NFL in jerseys sold. (Money!) Is it not crazy that a frequently asked question among fans — “Why do coaches allow their players to act like that?” — has no good answer, has become rhetorical?

In Piazza’s case, a steroid shadow must exist because sluggers of his era are as they should be: Guilty until proven innocent. That’s not our fault; that’s MLB’s fault starting with “Bottom Line” Bud Selig, the anything-for-a-buck team owners from whom he exchanged winks, nods and revenue, and their equally greed-driven, “adversaries” (mutually silent partners), Donald Fehr’s MLBPA.

That they bartered their foresight — none of these bean-counting geniuses could see it coming; the lid would remain sealed? — until legions of sensational sluggers inevitably faced deserved revelations and suspicions of steroid and HGH dependence.

Given the visceral, to stake our lives on whether Piazza became a Hall-of-Fame slugger while playing clean in a steroid-saturated era, which button would you push?

And if we were right, then shame on Piazza. And if we were wrong, then shame on Selig and his Shut Up And Count The Money Club.

Change is good for some. Every nickel and dime of it.

As the NFL grows impossible to endure as a sport — it’s now more in line with 18th Century Paris, which held public executions on holidays to draw and please the masses — those who long ago should have seized their power bases to demand it reverse itself or at least stop, continue to take dives. Instead, we’re consistently treated as if we’re too dim to see or know better.

An added alarming element to Saturday’s Steelers-Bengals prison gang war was CBS’s lead team of Jim Nantz and Phil Simms, which should have felt no constraints in letting us know they also were watching what we could scarcely believe we were watching. They soft-shoed it from above and beyond, no big deal.

Consider that even before kickoff — as seen on tape — a security detail separated the warring tribes during warm-ups/prison yard rec-time.

Yet, not until a few seconds were left in the game — game? It resembled an elimination round among Cossacks — did Simms, just above a whisper, say we were witnessing “a disgrace.” Moments earlier, after dehumanized Vontaze Burfict’s late, near-criminal head-shot to Antonio Brown was shown in a replay, Nantz managed a soft, “Oh, my goodness.”

For crying out loud, where had they been? In the second quarter, Bengals DT Domata Peko, conspicuous in his hooded rain parka, left the sideline to shove an on-field Steeler. Sure, he was penalized, he should have been ejected.

But in a playoff game, the best Simms could muster about this was, “That’s a bad play.” A bad play? Peko wasn’t even in the game to make any kind of play! It was insane!

And so was everything and everyone else. Yet Nantz and Simms were careful not to insult any of the offending, game-destroying players or coaches, not even career miscreant Pacman Jones, now respectfully addressed as Adam Jones — in line with his “new” persona, which still impersonates a creep.

This was a game — a brutalized, blooded spectacle of profane self-indulgence interrupted by warm, tragi-comedic “Football Is Family” NFL image ads — in which the Bengals barely defeated the Steelers in doing their uncivilized best to lose.

And if that wasn’t enough to move two decent men on solid network footing to issue, early and often, their condemnations while holding the worst, coaches included, in contempt — that neither Nantz nor Simms stated their sense of sport and humanity wasn’t fully assaulted and insulted, thus pandering to it — only added to the insult, the disgust and the sustaining destruction.