Aaron Donald is coming back, and somehow the idea still feels a little unreal.

Two years after retiring with nothing left to prove, the future Hall of Fame defensive tackle is putting No. 99 back on for the Los Angeles Rams. The comeback had been building for weeks, with Donald working out with the team and giving everyone more than enough reason to wonder if he was serious. On Sunday, the speculation finally ended. Donald agreed to a one-year, $20 million deal that can reach $30 million with incentives, and he practiced with the Rams for the first time since the 2023 season.

It is easy to get carried away with what this could look like. Picture Donald crashing through the middle while Myles Garrett comes off the edge, forcing quarterbacks to choose which nightmare they'd rather face. Between them, Los Angeles now has five Defensive Player of the Year awards and 236.5 career sacks. It's so unbelievable that some fans went as far as asking Roger Goodell to pull a David Stern and block the trade. 

But there's a fair question hiding underneath the excitement. Donald's 35, hasn't played in more than two and a half years, and plays a position that asks players to take enormous punishment every week. Looking sharp in a workout isn't the same as fighting through double-teams on an NFL Sunday.

The Rams don't need him to be the same player who dominated the league for a decade. They already have a talented defense, and they can ease him back into the rotation. If Donald can still create chaos in the biggest moments, that may be more than enough to put this team over the top.

Donald Wasn't Fading When He Left

Most comeback stories ask you to forget about how the player actually looked at the end. That’s not really the case with Donald. His final season only seemed quiet because he’d set the bar so high.

In 2023, Donald started 16 games and finished with eight sacks, 53 tackles, 16 tackles for loss, and 23 quarterback hits. He earned his eighth First-Team All-Pro selection and made the Pro Bowl for the 10th time in 10 seasons. ESPN’s pass-rush win-rate data had him tied for first among defensive tackles at 20%, even though the Rams’ opponents double-teamed him 63% of their pass plays when he was on the field.

Pro Football Focus gave him a 90.8 overall grade on 921 snaps, making him the only player in PFF’s history to post a grade above 90 in 10 straight seasons. He wasn’t hanging around at the end. He was still one of the best interior defenders in football when he walked away.

Donald retired because he felt “complete” after 10 seasons, 111 sacks, and a Super Bowl-clinching pressure that’ll live forever in Los Angeles. By March 2024, the weekly grind and the time away from his family didn’t feel worth whatever else football had left to offer.

That's what makes this comeback so unique. The Rams aren’t bringing back a player whose body forced him out and hoping it can somehow survive one more season. Donald chose to leave while he could still dominate. He’s also spent the last two years giving a body that absorbed double-teams for a decade a chance to recover.

That doesn’t mean this is going to be easy. Football conditioning is its own miserable thing. Kobie Turner explained the challenge perfectly to ESPN:

Nowhere else in the world are you used to taking on 600 pounds worth on double-teams.

You can stay strong and explosive in a gym, but good luck recreating the violence of an NFL snap.

Donald spent 13 weeks testing whether a comeback was realistic, filming workouts and comparing his movements and cuts to older footage of himself. He thinks he looks the same, maybe even a little cleaner. That’s encouraging. It still won’t tell us how his legs will feel in the fourth quarter or how quickly his hands will work after 30 snaps of actual contact.

McVay hasn’t even committed to playing him in the Sept. 10 opener against the San Francisco 49ers in Melbourne. That’s probably the right call. Donald doesn’t need to rush back just to prove that his name still belongs at the top of the depth chart.

The Rams Can Use Him Like A Luxury

The last time Donald played, the Rams’ entire defensive front revolved around him. Quarterbacks got the ball out quickly and opposing offenses spent all week figuring out how to keep him from wrecking the pocket. He still made plays anyway, and everyone around him benefited from the attention.

This time, he’s coming back to a defense that already figured out how to survive without him. The Rams generated pressure on 38% of opposing dropbacks last season, the fifth-best rate in the NFL — and finished seventh with 47 sacks. That happened with a young front led by Kobie Turner, Byron Young, Braden Fiske and Jared Verse.

Verse is now in Cleveland because the Rams used him as the centerpiece of the trade for Garrett. Los Angeles also gave up a first, second, and third-round pick spread across the next three drafts. That’s a massive price, but Garrett's coming off a record 23-sack season and his second Defensive Player of the Year award. This was never going to be a small upgrade.

Donald makes Garrett even harder to deal with. According to ESPN Analytics and NFL Next Gen Stats, Garrett and Donald rank first and second in pass-rush wins since Garrett entered the league in 2017.

Donald still being second despite missing the last two full seasons is just insane to think about, and his 276 wins against double-teams are easily the most in the league over that span.

So what’s an offense supposed to do on third-and-8? Slide protection toward Garrett and leave a guard one-on-one with Donald? Keep everything tight inside and ask a tackle to handle the guy who just set the single-season sack record? Leave another blocker in and hope the Rams' five secondary players can't cover the three receivers in routes?

There isn’t a great answer. The Rams also don’t have to throw Donald into every early-down snap to make offenses worry about him. Turner's already a real difference-maker inside. Los Angeles produced a 43.2% pressure rate with him on the field last season and just 27.2% without him.

Donald can be the third-down problem. He can move around, find the weakest interior blocker, and let it rip for 20 or 25 snaps instead of trying to grind through 55. The Rams can take it easy with him early in the season and save the heavy workload for December and January, when every snap matters a little more.

Even 75% of the old Donald would be an absurdly good rotational player.

This Comeback Is About One More February

Donald isn’t coming back to save a team stuck in the past. The Rams made it all the way to the NFC Championship Game without him and finished four points short of Seattle. Then they added McDuffie and made the biggest move of the offseason by trading for Garrett. They were already Super Bowl favorites before Donald signed.

Garrett's what changed everything. McVay originally called Donald to get his thoughts while the Rams were deciding whether to make the trade. But once Garrett landed in Los Angeles, Donald started thinking about football again. The two stayed in touch while Donald figured out whether he really wanted to come back, and Donald said he and McVay talked “damn near every day.”

His wife, Erica, had to be on board, too. Coming back meant jumping all the way back into football, and Donald knew he couldn’t do it halfway. By the time he walked into the team meeting Sunday, he was ready to start at the back of the drill lines and earn whatever role the Rams gave him.

If this didn't already seem like a too-good-to-be-true type of story, Super Bowl LXI is going to be played at SoFi Stadium, the same place where Donald helped finish the Rams’ last championship by forcing Joe Burrow into that desperate fourth-down throw. Now he has a chance to make another title run on the same field, this time as the final piece of a defense that already looks completely ridiculous.

Of course, there’s no guarantee this ends with Donald lifting another Lombardi Trophy. He might need a few weeks to look like himself again. His body might also remind everyone why 35-year-old defensive tackles don’t usually come back after sitting out for two full seasons.

The Rams can live with that uncertainty. Donald doesn’t have to carry the defensive line anymore or play 60 snaps because everything falls apart without him. He just has to be dangerous often enough to make an already loaded defense even more unfair.

The Rams open the season against the San Francisco 49ers in Melbourne on Thursday, Sept. 10th at 8:35 p.m. ET, streaming exclusively on Netflix.

All stats courtesy of NFL Pro.

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