Aaron Donald Is Back, and He’s Hungry
By Jason Burrell | South Bay Black Journal
WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. — Aaron Donald didn’t need to come back.
Think about that for a second.
There is nothing left for Donald to prove in this game. He has a Super Bowl ring. Three NFL Defensive Player of the Year awards. Eight first-team All-Pro selections. Ten Pro Bowls in 10 seasons. He already built the kind of résumé that will eventually lead to Canton.
He could have stayed home and watched football like the rest of us.
Instead, after two seasons away from the game, Aaron Donald is putting the pads back on.
The Los Angeles Rams announced Sunday that Donald has officially come out of retirement and is returning to the only NFL franchise he has ever played for. According to NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport, Donald agreed to a one-year, $20 million contract with playoff incentives that could push the deal to $30 million.
But the money isn’t the most interesting part of this comeback.
Neither are the 111 career sacks.
It’s why a 35-year-old man who had already conquered football, walked away on his own terms and spent two years building a life without the game decided there was still something inside of him worth chasing.
For Donald, the answer didn’t come overnight.
It came through conversations.
With his coach.
With his wife.
With his children.
And maybe most importantly, with himself.
“It was a long process,” Donald said Sunday after practice.
Donald said the idea began taking shape roughly 13 or 14 weeks ago as he watched what the Rams were building. He saw the pieces being assembled around a roster that already believed it could compete for a championship.
Then Los Angeles added Myles Garrett.
That got Donald’s attention.
“I wish I was still out there playing right about now,” Donald remembered thinking.
Somewhere between watching from a distance and talking almost daily with Sean McVay, retirement stopped feeling quite as permanent.
Donald started training.
Not casually.
Not like a retired great trying to stay in shape.
He began what he described as 13 or 14 weeks of “nonstop grinding,” trying to answer a question nobody else could answer for him:
Can I still be Aaron Donald?
He didn’t leave that question to reputation.
Donald recorded his workouts and studied himself.
Every movement.
Every cut.
Every hip flip.
He wanted to see what his body was telling him instead of relying on what his name told everybody else.
His conclusion?
“Do I feel like I can play at a high level? Yes,” Donald said. “Do I feel like I can still be myself? One hundred percent. If I didn’t feel like that, I wouldn’t be here.”
That sounds like confidence.
But underneath it was something even more important.
Conviction.
Because Donald understood that returning to football meant giving something up, too.
The last two years had been good to him.
He had been a husband. A father. A businessman. He could work from home. He spent time building things away from football and enjoying a life he had earned after pouring everything he had into the game for a decade.
Coming back meant stepping back into the fire.
And before Aaron Donald could become a Ram again, he first had to make sure returning was right for the Donald family.
“My wife played a huge part of me making this decision, period,” Donald said. “Because if the wife wasn’t happy, it wasn’t gonna get done.”
Erica Donald wasn’t merely approving a football transaction.
She helped her husband work through it.
Donald said there were days when he wasn’t sure, and his wife encouraged him not to rush.
Take your time.
Make sure this is what you really want.
Their children wanted Dad to play again, too.
Erica captured the lighter side of her role Sunday on social media, joking after the announcement that she had “let him out of the house.” But Donald’s comments revealed that behind the joke were weeks of serious family conversations about what returning to the NFL would require.
This wasn’t simply Aaron Donald deciding whether he missed football.
The family had to decide whether football belonged in their lives again.
And then there was McVay.
( The Relationship )
The relationship between Donald and his head coach may be one of the most important pieces in understanding how this comeback happened.
McVay wanted Aaron Donald back.
Of course he did.
Every NFL coach would.
But McVay also understood that getting Donald back couldn’t simply be about what was best for the Los Angeles Rams.
At some point, Sean McVay had to take off the Rams head coach hat and talk to Aaron Donald as someone who knew the man underneath the helmet.
“He means a lot to me,” McVay said. “And it’s way bigger than football.”
There is history between the two. Shared victories. Shared disappointments. A Super Bowl championship. Relationships between their families.
McVay knew what football had demanded from Donald.
He had watched Donald, in McVay’s words, pour “every ounce of his soul” into the game for 10 seasons.
That’s why McVay didn’t believe Donald owed the Rams anything.
McVay said he had to remove his own bias as Rams head coach and have an honest conversation with the person sitting on the other side of it.
If Donald was coming back, he needed to come back because Aaron Donald wanted to play football again.
“I kinda knew for two weeks,” Donald said.
But even after making the decision privately, he kept preparing before making it public.
Because Donald understood something about commitment that applies far beyond football.
“Once you choose to come back, you all the way back in,” Donald said. “Can’t be halfway in.”
There it is.
That’s the Aaron Donald part of this comeback.
The standard!
Donald walked back into the Rams facility Sunday as one of the greatest defensive players in NFL history and immediately made something clear.
He isn’t asking for his old job back.
“I’m not here to be given nothing,” Donald said. “I earn any position that I’m in. Whatever that is, whatever my role is, I’m gonna earn it.”
Think about the humility inside that statement.
Three Defensive Player of the Year awards don’t earn him tomorrow’s snap.
Eight first-team All-Pro selections don’t earn it.
A Super Bowl championship doesn’t earn it.
His 111 sacks don’t earn it.
Yesterday’s greatness doesn’t automatically purchase today’s opportunity.
Donald said he intends to earn whatever comes next.
That might be the most Aaron Donald thing he said all afternoon.
Of course, there is another reason the football world is fascinated by this comeback.
Myles Garrett and Aaron Donald are now on the same defensive front.
Garrett is coming off a 23-sack season and his second Defensive Player of the Year award. Together, Garrett and Donald own five Defensive Player of the Year awards and 236.5 career sacks.
The names surrounding them matter, too.
Byron Young. Braden Fiske. Kobie Turner. Poona Ford.
Donald isn’t returning to rescue the Rams defense. He’s joining one that was already loaded.
On paper, it looks ridiculous.
Donald admitted that mattered.
He watched the Rams add Garrett and strengthen the secondary and started seeing what he called “a complete team.”
“That could be fun, right?” Donald said.
Fun for Donald, perhaps.
For opposing quarterbacks?
Not at all!!!
Even before Donald returned, the Rams were the betting favorite to win Super Bowl LXI, according to DraftKings.
The Rams will enter the season as the only team with multiple players who have each won Defensive Player of the Year more than once.
Donald’s return also puts him in rare historical company. When he appears in a game, he will join Deion Sanders, now known to a generation of football fans as Coach Prime, as the only players in NFL history to return after earning first-team All-Pro honors at least five times.
The history is impressive.
The possibilities are even more impressive.
But McVay wasn’t interested in crowning anybody Sunday.
He knows what happens when talent gets confused with accomplishment.
“None of that means a damn thing,” McVay said.
The Rams still have to become a football team.
McVay emphasized humility, work and what happens when adversity inevitably arrives.
Donald echoed him.
“Nothing’s promised,” Donald said. “Nothing’s guaranteed.”
That may be the necessary balance to all the excitement surrounding Los Angeles.
The possibilities of this defensive front have already produced comparisons to the Rams’ legendary Fearsome Foursome, the defensive line made famous by Deacon Jones, Merlin Olsen and others.
But nobody wins a Lombardi Trophy in August.
Nobody has blocked Donald and Garrett together yet.
McVay hasn’t even committed to Donald playing in the Sept. 10 season opener against San Francisco in Melbourne, Australia.
The Rams will take that part slowly.
Donald participated in individual work Sunday, but McVay said the next phase will involve putting him into team situations, allowing him to take on double teams and reacclimating his body to the physical demands of football before deciding whether playing in Australia is realistic.
Donald seems comfortable with that.
Day by day.
Rep by rep.
Earn it.
Perhaps that’s why this comeback feels different.
Aaron Donald didn’t return because football was the only thing he had.
He returned after discovering he could live without it.
He built a life.
He spent time with his family.
He explored business.
He stepped away long enough to know retirement wasn’t something he was running from.
Now the man who once helped close out a Super Bowl at SoFi Stadium has returned during a season that could end in the same building.
But this isn’t 2021.
Donald isn’t coming back to recreate an old championship team.
He’s joining a new one.
Different teammates.
Different circumstances.
And perhaps a different Aaron Donald.
One who knows now what life feels like without football.
One who didn’t need to return.
One whose coach loved him enough not to pressure him.
One whose wife told him to take his time.
One whose children wanted to see Dad play again.
One who spent nearly 14 weeks privately asking his body whether greatness was still in there.
And when Aaron Donald finally got his answer, he came back.
Not asking to be handed anything.
Ready to earn it again.
Aaron Donald is back.
And apparently, he’s hungry.
