This era’s premier defensive player has still not definitively said he will play again in 2022, though this situation continues to lean that way. The Rams and Aaron Donald have been discussing a contract adjustment for several weeks, and the future Hall of Famer confirmed the retirement rumors are at least partially contract-related.
Donald, who turned 31 last week, is tied to his 2018 extension, one that briefly represented an defender-record deal (six years, $135MM). But several players have passed the all-world defensive tackle in the years since.
“For me, it’s about winning. I don’t want to play football if I can’t win anyway, so I feel like if I got a real opportunity to win another Super Bowl, then it makes sense to play,” Donald said during an appearance on the I Am Athlete podcast (via Bleacher Report’s Erin Walsh). “But again, it’s still a business, and we got to handle the business side of things, and if that wasn’t to get handled then, you know, [it’s an] it-is-what-it-is type of situation.
“I’ll be fine regardless, but me talking about retirement, that was happening way before we won a Super Bowl. I’ve been saying that since I got into the league I was going to play eight years and be done. That’s just what I’ve been saying. … If I was to play, it’s just to win another Super Bowl, but at the end of the day, it’s still a business and it got to make sense to me and my family.”
The Rams have been on this for months now. They have hammered out a Matthew Stafford extension and have since turned their attention to two players who still have multiple years of team control remaining. Donald and Cooper Kupp are signed through 2024 and 2023, respectively, but have outplayed their contracts. Donald is now the NFL’s sixth-highest-paid defender; Kupp is the league’s 18th-highest-paid receiver. It is not known if Kupp will receive a full-blown new deal, but the next Rams-Donald transaction is expected to be an…
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