NFL Training Camps Preview | Overreaction Monday with Rich & Chris Brockman

Training camps are days away, which means Overreaction Monday is back, and Chris Brockman came out of the gate with a proposal so ambitious that Rich rejected it before hearing a single word of the argument.

The pitch: the NFL should follow the World Cup's lead and stage a third-place game on the Sunday of the Super Bowl bye week.

"That would be the dumbest thing I could ever comprehend," Rich said.

To his credit, Chris had bullet points, which he announced with pride and then delivered in order. Gambling is part of the sports world now, the league has multiple partners, and the average NFL playoff game draws somewhere between 80 and 130 million dollars in handle. Give the players a cut, say 10 percent, and that is an extra 150 to 250 thousand dollars per man on a 53-man roster. Give the winning team the 19th overall pick to motivate the front office. Sell the window to a streamer, because there is nothing else on that weekend.

Rich dismantled it by simply applying it to last season. That game is the Rams and the Broncos. That is Jared Stidham against Stetson Bennett, or it is asking a near-40-year-old Matthew Stafford to suit up one more time coming off a gutting loss to Seattle.

"Would you even watch it?" Rich asked.

He also pointed out the draft pick problem. The owner sitting on the 19th overall selection is not volunteering to slide back so a third-place team can leapfrog him.

"What a flat-out overreaction start," Rich said, though he did compliment the preparation.

Things got more serious with Aaron Donald, where Chris argued it is a matter of when he returns to the Rams, not if. Rich agreed. The only open question in his mind is whether Donald comes back for a full season or half of one, and he suspects Donald only knows one speed.

Chris floated stamina as the obvious concern after three missed seasons, and Rich pushed back on the premise itself. Question Donald's conditioning, his mental readiness, his desire, and you run out of runway fast, because you cannot actually question any of them. What remains is whether he wants to.

And Rich thinks the environment makes that easy. He watched Myles Garrett on Micah Parsons' podcast at Fanatics Fest, with Parsons doing his usual chest-first routine about coming for the sack record, and Garrett telling him it is still his time. Garrett said he could break it again this year.

The version of Garrett who sat miserable at that Super Bowl in New Orleans, done with Cleveland and looking it, is gone.

"Everything's coming up roses," Rich said. "The sky is blue, the wine tastes better, the food tastes better. Why wouldn't Aaron Donald want to do that if he still has desires to play?"

Chris then argued Jayden Daniels is facing a bigger make-or-break season than C.J. Stroud. Rich would not go to make-or-break, but he would go somewhere close. Daniels played five games last year and played well in really one of them, and Washington lost that game.

The broader problem is that everything the Commanders did well in their NFC Championship run two years ago vanished. Rich challenged Chris to name one thing that carried over, and neither of them could. The Terry McLaurin situation, the trade questions, the injury, the coordinators, all of it.

The schedule offers no mercy either. At Philadelphia, at Dallas, home for Seattle, and a first half that runs through London, the Giants, a Monday nighter at San Francisco, then Philadelphia again and the Rams at home.

On Jeremy Fowler's top 10 quarterback list, Chris argued someone from six through 10 wins a Super Bowl before someone from one through five. Rich called it an overreaction and then one-upped him, predicting a top-five quarterback wins it this season, and a repeat winner at that. Pressed, he went with number three.

He also acknowledged that Stafford and the Rams is the low-hanging fruit everyone is already picking.

The rest of the hour hit fast. Rich shot down the idea that a losing quarterback in a training camp battle gets traded before week one, calling it an overreaction unless an injury forces someone's hand, because the third-stringer usually ends up playing anyway. On Cam Skattebo's backflip at Fanatics Fest, Rich thinks he stuck the landing and slipped on the surface, and that the real issue is decision-making from the young core in New York. And on Dallas, Rich would not commit to NFC Championship or bust, but he made a detailed case that the roster and the schedule give the Cowboys a genuine path to the one seed.

Chris and Rich are off next Monday. Rich will be in Michigan doing the show from Coach Whittingham's golf event.