The Rich Top 5: Things That Will Blow His Mind If They Happen in the 2026 NFL Season

Rich very nearly spent this segment ranking his Labor Day weekend goals, a list that was heading somewhere honest. Number five was do nothing. Number four was watch football and do nothing. Number three was eat, watch football and do nothing.

Chris Brockman talked him into a better one. Five things that would blow Rich's mind if they actually happened in the season that starts next Wednesday in Seattle. The catch, and the reason the list works, is that none of them are impossible. Rich picked things that could happen, which is a different exercise than picking things that will not.

He opened at five with a rushing title for Jadarian Price. The path is real enough to say out loud. Seattle needs to run it, Zach Charbonnet is not there yet, and Price is stepping into the job Kenneth Walker left behind, which points at bell-cow volume. What would blow Rich's mind is the name on the leaderboard at the end, because it would mean it was not Saquon Barkley, not Bijan Robinson, not Jahmyr Gibbs, not Jonathan Taylor.

The objection from the couch was that Price is a rookie, and rookies do not do this. That turned out to be wrong, and the correction came with receipts. Barkley led the league as a rookie in 2018. Kareem Hunt did it the year before. Ezekiel Elliott did it the year before that. Three straight, in fact, which nobody in the room remembered. Eric Dickerson still holds the rookie record at 1,808 yards.

At four, Rich went after the softest consensus in football right now. Everybody has decided the Giants are a sleeper. Everybody likes what John Harbaugh brings from Baltimore. Everybody notes the young talent. Rich's point is that all of that enthusiasm quietly stops at a wild card. "The Giants winning the division, though? I think everybody that says they're a sleeper team, look out for the Giants, thinks they'll get a wild card. But beating the Cowboys and the Eagles to win the whole division? That would blow my mind."

Three was comeback player of the year Anthony Richardson, and Rich built the scenario rather than just naming it. Say Richardson gets a shot. Say he starts playing out of his skull. Then you get the image that sold it, with Daniel Jones standing on the sideline holding his helmet, healthy, and nowhere to go.

Two was MVP finalist Deshaun Watson, which briefly stopped the room. Rich made a version of a case anyway, pointing at a receiver group with Jerry Jeudy and Quentin Johnston to take pressure off, and at the fact that there was a stretch, not that long ago, when this would not have registered as absurd at all.

Then number one, which Rich thinks might be the likeliest thing on his own list.

Super Bowl champion Aaron Rodgers.

The full picture is what makes it land. The Steelers win it all. Mike McCarthy comes home and wins it all. The game is in Los Angeles, in the home of the Rams, which for Pittsburgh is barely a road trip. "Terrible towels waving in the home of the Rams." And Rodgers walks off into the sunset, to Malibu or wherever he wants, having bought his last meal in two states. "He forever now has to pay for no meals in Wisconsin or Western Pennsylvania."

Rich flagged the ranking problem himself, and he is right about it. The thing at the top of a list of mind-blowing outcomes is the one he considers most achievable. "That might be the most possible thing out of all the five on my list right here."

Which is the tell about this season. The list is not a collection of absurdities. It is five things that would rearrange how everyone talks about the NFL, and every one of them has a plausible route.