That was quite a game last night at Jacksonville, but it’s got nothing on the showdown over the stadium the Jets want to build on the West Side of Manhattan. The fight over the West Side stadium is starting to look like a Super Bowl showdown all by itself – between the political culture and the market culture. These columns have long favored a market-based approach to this, meaning a call for proposals and a decision based on the best price to the people of New York and with complete transparency so the public can know that it is getting the best price for the site. One would think these would be the principles on which the Bloomberg administration, more than any other in recent decades, would also want to approach this problem.

Yet the mayor and his colleagues are dismissing, out of hand, an offer for the proposed site of the West Side stadium that Cablevision, the owner of Madison Square Garden, values at $600 million. “This is a desperate, last minute attempt to derail a project that will create thousands of jobs, more than $1 billion in tax revenue, and allow New York to realize its Olympic dreams by building a world class sports and convention center,” insisted the deputy major, Daniel Doctoroff, who sounded a little desperate himself. “This is a desperate ploy and a cynical P.R. gimmick by a company that has already demonstrated that it will do anything to protect its monopoly,” echoed a spokeswoman for the Jets, Marissa Shorenstein.

Our purpose here is not to argue for one proposal or the other but rather to speak of principles. The owners of Cablevision, Charles and James Dolan, have always maintained that the West Side stadium would be a threat to their own sports arena over Penn Station. Cablevision and Madison Square Garden, according to a study by Common Cause/New York, spent at least $8.2 million lobbying against the stadium in the last year, and the Dolans themselves contributed $115,300 to assorted state and city politicians in the last four. So it’s not exactly news that their interest in the stadium site stems from their interest in preventing a competitor to Madison Square Garden from arising two blocks away.

But Mayor Bloomberg and the Jets would have an easier time dismissing the Cablevision bid as anti-competitive if their own plan for West Side development weren’t itself still awaiting a market test. These columns have argued from the beginning that the city and state would do better by issuing a request for proposals and establishing an open, transparent bidding process for the West Side rail yards. Instead, the city and the state adopted the Jets’ plan without such a process and thus without inviting, let alone considering, other alternatives. The Cablevision bid suddenly has many New Yorkers – left and right, ourselves as well as, say, the Times – thinking that Mr. Bloomberg’s central planning approach was shortsighted.

On the face of it, the Jets have offered the Metropolitan Transportation Authority $100 million for the building site, though the MTA has now asked the franchise to pay $300 million, in order to build a new stadium. The plan also calls for the state and city to spend a combined $600 million for a retractable roof over the stadium and a platform over the rail yards. Cablevision, meanwhile, has offered to pay $600 million to the MTA to build a residential community with office and retail space. The Cablevision bid includes the cost of the platform. Both plans claim to generate huge numbers of jobs and tax revenues in the out years.

Late yesterday sources were telling our Meghan Clyne that a pro-stadium coalition plans to release a report today claiming that the Cablevision bid is actually worth much less than $600 million. Subtracting the cost of the $250 platform, the Cablevision offer for the Hudson Rail Yards amounts to $350 million. If all the various proposals were expressed in terms of present value, assert advocates of the Jets’ proposal, the Cablevision bid may actually be worth less than the Jets’ offer. If that turns out to be true, we have no doubt that the MTA would end up rejecting the Cablevision bid in favor of the Jets.

Whichever proposal turns out to be the more attractive offer, the point is that the city owes it to New Yorkers to explore all alternatives. How strange to see our businessman mayor pulling for the political culture, calling, as he did yesterday before all the facts are in, the Cablevision bid a “disgrace” and a “joke” and a “stunt.” His strategy has resulted in increasingly skeptical New Yorkers asking why he thinks selling the West Side property at a $300 million loss – at the least – is going to be worth it. We understand that Mr. Doctoroff harbors “Olympic dreams,” but if the price of the Olympics is that we abjure a transparent, market solution to development issues, then the idea of a New York Olympics starts to lose its logic.