Aaron Donald’s Size 16 Nike cleats were impossible to fill, at least with one player. Les Snead said Monday he needed five top-100 selections in the NFL draft to fill the shoes of his 10-time Pro Bowler, who retired last March.
Snead told Kay Adams Monday, reminding everyone who may have taken last season for granted, that the Rams committed significant capital to field the budding young stars that filled Donald’s void last year.
In 2023, realizing Donald wouldn’t play forever, they used the third-rounder they acquired in the Jalen Ramsey trade to take Byron Young at 77, then traded up later in the round to get Kobie Turner at 89. And once Donald retired, Snead committed his 2024 first-rounder to the eventual NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year, Jared Verse, at 19.
Then, Snead reunited Verse with his college teammate, Braden Fiske at 39, by sending a pair of second-rounders and a fifth-round pick to Carolina. Los Angeles paid five top-100 picks – Young, Turner, Verse, Fiske and the additional second-rounder for Fiske -- for the player many consider the most dominant defensive lineman in NFL history.
The post-Super Bowl years have been a challenge for Snead, but he’s handled it remarkably well.
“I think I mentioned to someone, realistically, sometimes because we're cleaning it up,” Snead told Adams on Monday’s edition of the Up & Adams show, “let's call it our salary cap, there is an element in football we’re probably all scared to say, ‘Let's intentionally go do that.’
“And then we're forced to, for the long-term term, let's call it, help sustainability of the program. You're just forced to. And sometimes you're like, ‘Wait a minute, we can do that?’ But if you just sat down and say, ‘Let's do it,’ I think we all say, ‘You know what? Let's just try to run it back one more.’”
One more, as in another Rams Super Bowl berth, is something more and more prognosticators are predicting. After all, no other team in the postseason played the eventual champion Eagles closer than Matthew Stafford and the Rams.
And while Stafford, Snead and McVay have great memories of Donald’s time as a player, one thing no one is predicting is Donald coming out of retirement -- at least for now.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com/nfl/rams/ as Les Snead Details What it Took to Replace Aaron Donald.