Albert Breer on Aaron Donald's Return to Rams

All right.

Welcome in.

It is the Breer Report for August 30th, a little bit of an emergency Breer report here.

Aaron Donald has officially come out of retirement as so many people have expected over the course of the last couple of months.

Um, he will return on a one-year deal now.

Contrary to some of the stuff that you might have seen, he actually isn't under contract for $30 million on his old existing deal.

They had previously for cap purposes, knocked that number all the way down to the minimum, so they had to negotiate a new deal here.

He will be reinstated under the existing deal, which means he will be reinstated at the minimum for 2026, then they will rip that deal up and in its place will be a one-year deal that maxes out at $30 million.

Now, this deal is heavy on incentives, the bases.

Way below $30 million but he'll have a chance to get there with a mixture of reachable playtime incentive, incentives, per-game roster bonuses , which of course, come down to him being on the game day roster and then playoff incentives.

So he'll get a chance to get to that $30 million number, but it's important to know that that's not what was there.

So when they reinstate him, they'll be able to do it without adjusting the contract first.

Now, what are the Rams gonna get?

Cause that is the $30 million dollar question here.

And the answer is, I think it's fair to expect something that's really, really good.

And I say that because I know over the course of the last two months, as Aaron Donald has put in so much work to try to figure out whether or not He could play, his standard has been can I feel like myself?

And what we've said all along is the bar for that, and this is what's tricky about it, the bar for that is higher than maybe it's ever been for any defensive lineman ever, right?

And if it's not, it's a very small group of players.

Players who've reached Aaron Donald's level, and he wanted to be able to say, yes, I can come back and feel like myself again, and I can play like Aaron Donald again.

And so at the very least, it doesn't mean he's gonna be 2018 Aaron Donald, when he won the Defensive Player of the Year and had 20.5 sacks, but he does feel like he can play that way.

At least in a little bit of a different capacity, and we'll get to that in a second.

Now, he and Sean McVeigh have been in contact throughout.

Um, they are very close and they have been talking on a near daily basis over the course of the last 3 months as they, as they've discussed.

Whether or not Donald was gonna go forward with this.

Of course, the motivator here was the trade for Miles Garrett, which happened right there on June 1st.

So when that deal goes down, Aaron Donald seriously starts considering it, and then the discussion starts between McVeigh and Donald, and those two are very close.

Those two for weeks now have had a detailed plan on how Aaron Donald's return was going to happen.

And the window really opened for him to return when the team broke camp at Loyola Marymount, went back to their home facility.

Part of that is that's where Aaron Donald was working out.

And the reason you heard, heard that his workouts had to be reported was because when he put a helmet on, they had to report that as a workout, but he was consistently working out at the team's uh facility, which is about an hour north of, of where they held training camp.

Their home facility is up in the valley.

And as he got closer, started to feel like more like himself , and this became more of an inevitability.

Now, OK, so what's the plan going forward?

Well, they've got the framework of how they are going to handle this from the two holdouts that Aaron Donald had at the very beginning of Sean McVeigh's time in Los Angeles.

In 2017, in 2018, Aaron Donald sat out all training camp.

Um, in, in, in, in, in, in search of a, a big second contract.

He wound up getting it after the 2018 holdout.

In 2017, if you remember and you turn back the clock, he reported right before week one, he did not play in a week one game, he's still won Defensive Player of the Year.

Then in 2018, Sean McVeigh's second year in charge with the Rams.

He, his holdout dragged all the way to August 31st.

Today's August 30th.

It dragged all the way to August 31st, at which point he signed a record-breaking new contract.

He did play week one that year, so that was a quick turnaround.

And he was able to win Defensive Player of the Year, post 20.5 sacks, which is an extraordinary number for an interior defensive lineman.

And the Rams got to the Super Bowl.

So you add all of it up, there's a detailed plan in place, it's something they've discussed over time.

Aaron Donald's been working up to this point, so they can execute the plan whenever he was, whenever he wound up showing up.

And one of the things too here is that he did want to be part of the Rams' journey from the beginning.

I felt all along, maybe it would be a better idea if you come in in October, November, and I brought that up to Rams people and what kept coming back was, no, he wants to be part of the whole thing.

He doesn't want to jump on a moving train, he wants to be part of the season from the start, so this will allow him to be part of the Rams team from the start of the regular season going forward, regardless of whether or not he plays in Australia or not, and that is one piece of it that like when I've talked to Rams people, I haven't gotten a ton of certainty on that one quite yet.

But the reality is, getting him back in any capacity is a huge win for the Rams, and now you look at their defensive front and what they're able to do on the defensive line, and they've already discussed how they're gonna deploy Aaron Donald.

But This doesn't need to be 2018, Aaron Donald.

If you look at like the depth and how they're gonna be able to rotate, there's the opportunity to keep a 35-year-old guy coming back after two years of retirement, fresh, keep his legs, and have him in position to be at his very best when it matters most cause he's coming back to win the Super Bowl.

So they want him at his very best in January and February.

And so you look at the depth of the defensive front and it is outrageous.

On the edge, they have Miles Garrett, they have Byron Young, they have Josiah Stewart, a 2nd-round pick who they're really optimistic about.

They've got a bunch of the 3 technique, 5 technique type, like penetrating defensive linemen with Donald now joining Braden Fisk and Kobe Turner, who's very accomplished in his own right.

Kobe played with Aaron Donald and has sort of been the replacement for Aaron Donald inside.

So you got those 3 guys you can rotate and a couple of very capable nose tackles and Puna Ford and Tyler Davis.

Having all that depth will allow them again to keep Aaron Donald fresh.

And my guess is at least at first, and I think the plan would be to do this throughout, we'll see if it sustains, is to try to play Aaron Donald 30 to 40 snaps a game.

That's less than he was playing before, but again, he's 35 now, he's coming back off of 2 years of retirement.

And so you get him in that rotation, you can use him in your nickel, you can use Him in your dime.

He's gonna be very effective, you would think, rushing the passer.

He is a smaller defensive lineman, so he's, it's more conducive to using him on passing downs.

And the idea of now all of a sudden, you're getting a fresh Aaron Donald coming off the bench and some of those packages with Miles Garrett and Kobe Turner and Byron Young and Braden Fisk and And, and, and maybe now, Aaron Donald sees some matchups that he wouldn't have seen earlier in his career cause the defense has to, or the offense has to deal with Miles Garrett.

Um, it should be a lot of fun to watch.

Again, it's hard to make a prediction because this is Really without precedent.

I mean, the closest thing I could think of was, was, was maybe you look at, at, at how Eric Weddle came back to the Rams in 2021, at the end of the 2021 season, but that was just for a month, right?

Deion Sanders is another example if you go further back.

I mean, to me, the closest thing I could think of in any sport was probably Michael Jordan coming back to the NBA and playing for the Wizards a few years after retiring from the Bulls, but it should be great to watch.

It's a win for football that Aaron Donald's gonna be back.

It's a huge win for the Rams.

They're getting Aaron Donald back into that group.

I can't wait to see it.

I know all of you can't wait to see it.

Um, it should be exciting and maybe, maybe we get to see it in just 11 days when the Rams open in Melbourne, Australia against the Niners.

And the interesting part about it is the Niners are leaving this week.

They're going over for a week to acclimate.

The Rams are treating this like a regular road trip.

So they do have a little more leeway to decide what they want to do there.

I'm sure they'll be using that to try to figure out how quickly they can get Donald up and ready to go.