All posts by : Don Lichterman

I want to be clear up front, this isn’t an “I told you so.” All I ever wanted was the actual science behind whether this makes sense.

I want to be clear up front, this isn’t an “I told you so.” All I ever wanted was the actual science behind whether this makes sense. That hour-long workout was a real, honest data point, and on its face, it wasn’t a good one.

Unless Aaron Donald can outplay the worst player on the roster at the position he’d realistically play, he shouldn’t come back at all. That’s my stance today.

I never said this out loud before now because it wasn’t real yet, but after watching that TMZ video, seeing that he’d be completely gassed by the one-minute mark did not surprise me at all. Honestly, it’s exactly what happened.

My concern now is the conditioning gap. Unless he’s been training like it’s a daily job since the day he retired in 2024, closing that out in a month or less is brutal. We’re ten days from camp. He needs to get un-gassed and get stronger than most of the guys already on this roster, and even then, is a limited Donald actually better than a full-time replacement-level player? Maybe as the best backup on the roster, sure, if he’s used in short bursts. But that’s also a lot of attention and a lot of roster real estate for a player who, on a bad day, is just okay, and okay isn’t worth the circus.

On a great day, sure, it’s the most unfair thing in football and I get why people are excited. But “great day” isn’t the baseline the coaches should be planning around. That’s the fine line I keep coming back to, and it’s on Sean McVay and the staff to actually gauge it rather than get caught up in the sentimentality of it all.

With training camp now just over a week away, the Rams find themselves working through one of the more fascinating roster puzzles in recent franchise memory, and it has nothing to do with a rookie or a free agent addition. It has to do with whether Aaron Donald, two years removed from retirement, still has enough left in the tank to justify bringing him back at all. This isn’t a nostalgia play, and it shouldn’t be treated as one. The only question that actually matters here is a cold, practical one, does a part-time, 35-year-old Donald genuinely outperform whoever would otherwise be occupying the bottom of that defensive line depth chart? If the answer is no, then this entire storyline is exactly the kind of feel-good distraction that a Super Bowl-caliber roster cannot afford to carry. Read The Full Article on The Los Angeles Rams Substack!