No Defensive Lineman Dominated the NFL Like Aaron Donald

Donald retires from the Rams as the greatest defensive player of his generation. We may never see another interior lineman like him again.

It isn’t hard to identify Aaron Donald’s career highlight. In fact, Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay knew it was coming before it even happened:

Technically, this play goes down in the record book as just an incomplete pass. Here’s the official play-by-play:

Joe Burrow pass incomplete, short right intended for Samaje Perine.

In reality, Donald’s pressure forced the fourth-down incompletion that won Super Bowl LVI for the Rams. The image of Donald pointing at his finger after the play, shouting “ring me” to the crowd in SoFi Stadium, will define his career. And not for nothing, it’s also worth remembering the play before this one, when Donald tackled Bengals running back Samaje Perine on third down, less than a yard short of the first-down marker. It wasn’t just one play to win the Super Bowl. It was back-to-back plays. As single-handed of a Super Bowl win as a defender can possibly have. He should have been the MVP in that game, but the league’s archaic voting process required ballots to be cast before the game ended, so Cooper Kupp took home that honor.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, Donald provided the pressure that forced Jimmy Garoppolo into the interception that clinched the NFC championship game for the Rams two weeks prior, to send the team to the Super Bowl in the first place. Another play that doesn’t show up for Donald in the stat sheet:

On Friday, Donald announced his retirement from the NFL. He’ll go down for many as the best defensive lineman of all time, if not the best defender of all time, full stop. His 2022 Super Bowl run is possibly the best postseason by a defensive player in league history. His retirement doesn’t just end an era of Rams football, but closes the book on one of the most dominant careers in NFL history, at any position.

The championship ring may be Donald’s crowning achievement—you can see that from the tears streaming down his face when he forced that incompletion—but Donald retires with as much hardware as nearly any defender who ever played. In 10 NFL seasons, he made the Pro Bowl 10 times. He was named a first-team All-Pro eight times. He won Defensive Player of the Year three times. He won Defensive Rookie of the Year when he first came into the league in 2014 and was named to the NFL’s All-Decade Team for the 2010s (it’s not out of the question that he’ll also make the all-2020s team, despite retiring less than halfway through the decade).

Now would be the cute part of a career retrospective where I’d write something like “It’s appropriate that Aaron Donald’s career-defining play didn’t count in the stat sheet because his contributions were often invisible.” Except that isn’t true. Donald had plenty of invisible contributions, sure (if you ever closely watched him, you quickly noticed how many bodies teams committed to stopping him), but he was also incredibly visible. He often stuffed the stat sheet. Some of the numbers barely make sense.

Donald recorded 111 sacks in his career—by far the most among players since he entered the league in 2014. The fact that Donald did that while primarily playing on the interior is difficult to comprehend, even for those of us who are lucky enough to have watched him. For future generations, it’ll be downright mind-boggling until they turn on the tape.

The nine players below Donald on the sacks list since 2014 are all true edge defenders—the closest defensive tackle is Kansas City’s Chris Jones, who has 75.5 sacks. By nature of the position, interior defensive linemen usually face double-teams, while edge defenders more frequently exploit one-on-one matchups. Donald’s ability to beat double- and triple-teams literally changed the math on defense and made him the outlier of all NFL outliers during his career. I mean, just look at this:

Now look again and consider that that graph is from the 2021 season, one of the “down” years for Donald. He was only third in Defensive Player of the Year voting that season!

Given the level of difficulty he faced, Donald’s production cannot be overstated. How many players instantly get multiple hits if you search their name with the phrase “quadruple-team” attached?

Donald is only 32, and he was still one of the most disruptive pass rushers in the league last season. He could have had many more productive seasons ahead of him. But this announcement didn’t come as a surprise—Donald had been publicly toying with retirement for several years now. And who can blame him, seeing the type of attention he gets from defenses on every snap?

As it stands, Donald had nothing left to prove. He almost single-handedly delivered his team a Lombardi Trophy. He rewrote record books and created a highlight reel that will be hard for anyone to top. He’s a surefire first-ballot Hall of Famer and one of the best players in league history. His career is over, and we’re still trying to comprehend his dominance. We maybe never will.