A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

What: Sports Agents as Media Stars

Some of my best friends are Agent-Americans.

So I have never questioned their natural place in the current messed-up order of things. Goofy player. Ridiculous money. Greedy owner. And last of all, occasionally annoying agent.

The player gets fame and money. The owner gets ego gratification and money. And the agent gets money. Everything kind of worked out.

But notice an ominous development:

What happens when agents start getting glory and glamour and ego gratification and movies made about them and nice clothes for fashion shoots and money?

What happens when super-agent Leigh Steinberg and bad boy-agent Drew Rosenhaus are draped in soft earth tones, eyes flitting coyly away from the camera, posed in . . . a fashion spread for GQ magazine?

What happens when there’s a film, “Jerry Maguire,” starring TOM CRUISE! as a lovable, Tom Cruise-like sports agent?

Or a movie starring Michael Jordan that names his agent, David Falk, as its executive producer?

Somewhere, somehow, somebody important has decreed that sports agents have moved from bit players to major luminaries to role models to fashion models, and pretty soon Steinberg is going to get so busy he’s going to have to hire an agent.

Is this what we really want our children to dream? Someday, if you work real hard, eat your vegetables and listen to your parents, you, too, can make money off the talents of others and become a star!

Nobody will want to grow to be 7-feet tall anymore or dream of spitting in the batters box. And that’s plain wrong.

What’s next? Sportswriters in movies?