Would You Want to be Traded If You Were Jonathan Taylor or Garrett Wilson???

Every contender with a hole in its backfield or its receiver room is calling Indianapolis and New York right now. Rich has a message for both front offices: hang up.

The conversation started with a Vikings caller wishing out loud that Minnesota could land Jonathan Taylor. Rich's response was that the rest of the National Football League feels the same way. The real question is whether Taylor will actually be available.

Rich had put that exact question to Jeff Saturday earlier in the show, and Saturday's answer was blunt. "I'd flip him." His reasoning was that the Colts are a year or two from turning things around, and moving a star is how a team positions itself to rebuild fast.

There is a catch, and Rich spelled it out. The Colts' first-round choice belongs to the Jets. Every game Indianapolis loses makes New York's pick better, not their own. Trading Taylor could recoup a first-rounder, but it also means trading away the face of the franchise.

"In terms of running backs, just off the top of your head, there's very few that are as good as Jonathan Taylor," Rich said. He added that Taylor is as good a human as he is a running back, and that fans "can't get enough of him." Rich, a Michigan man, also admitted he was glad Taylor is no longer in the Big Ten. "Go terrorize me somewhere else."

Then the show played Taylor's own words. Asked about the rumors, he said he hadn't heard anything and couldn't control it. "I'm always proud to wear the horseshoe," Taylor said, adding that his focus was rallying the locker room for a division game against Jacksonville.

A reporter then asked whether Taylor was okay being part of a rebuild. Taylor pushed back on the premise. "We're going out there trying to win," he said. "No one goes out there to wave the white flag and surrender." With two captains gone, he said, it's his job to rally the younger players and keep them focused, because "the NFL doesn't stop for anyone. And the business is the business."

"That answer right there is why you don't trade him," Rich said.

This is the core of Rich's long-running argument that there is no tanking in the NFL. Front offices may start a rebuild, but the players left behind are not waving a white flag. Rich described Taylor spending his whole day in the facility, the film room and the practice field, then getting pulled to a podium where someone says the word "rebuild." His reaction, in Rich's telling, is that he hasn't been thinking about that at all. He's thinking that his two guys are gone and he needs to lead.

"If you're like Jonathan Taylor, you stay," Rich said. And if a coach like Shane Steichen has his job on the line, he needs a player sending that message inside the building. The other voice on set added the fan angle: send Taylor away and there's no reason for anyone to show up the rest of the year.

The same logic applies to the Jets and Garrett Wilson. Rich noted that every team that needs a wide receiver, naming San Francisco and Kansas City, would love to land him. But New York already holds three picks in the top 12, including the Colts' pick, which is only getting better for them.

Wilson's answer to whether he would ask for a trade was simple. "I want to be here, man. I want to win games," he said. He was candid that he doesn't love New York more than he loves winning, but said he has stayed optimistic for years, which is why the losses each weekend "hurt a little more."

Rich loved it. "The Jets have to hold on to him. End of story," he said. What would four first-round picks even buy? New players the team hopes have the same refuse-to-quit mentality Wilson already shows after having "his brains beaten in after being nothing but a winner."

His advice to the Jets front office for anyone calling about Wilson: "New phone, who dis?" At some point New York will get the quarterback right, Rich argued, and that quarterback is going to need somebody like Wilson.