Rich: How a Possible Aaron Donald Rams Return Impacts the Entire NFL

Sean McVay said over the weekend that Aaron Donald is going through a process. Rich has been around long enough to know what that phrase usually costs a fan base in patience.

"He's going through a process to see if he wants to go through the process of playing football again," Rich said, before noting the obvious hazard of trusting the process anywhere near Los Angeles. LeBron James once showed up with a helicopter for that particular sales pitch. It did not go great.

The riff is funny. What sits underneath it is not.

Rich does not believe Donald walks away from this. "It'll be really for me shocking for him to go through this process and go, you know what, nah, I just went through it and I'm done," he said. The arguments against a return are real enough. Don't restart the Hall of Fame clock. Don't leave the house. Don't go through the rigors. Don't sit in LA traffic, which the show identified as the true villain, specifically the Sepulveda Pass on the 405 North.

What actually moved the needle was Les Snead. The Rams general manager went on the DeMarco and Travis afternoon show on ESPN LA 710 and said out loud what nobody inside the building had said yet.

"This is the first time Aaron probably had the itch to come back, try to do something meaningful, which has been cool to see," Snead said. Donald has genuinely enjoyed the years away, Snead explained. He has missed the game every now and then, never enough to say he wanted back in. Until now.

Then Snead said the part that turns a local story into a national one. "From a football perspective, I would love to see what would happen if you put both of them dudes out there at the same time."

Both of them dudes being Donald and Myles Garrett.

"How many times in a lifetime in this universe thing where, okay, wait a minute, Myles Garrett, and now Aaron Donald wants to come back, and he happens to still be young enough to do it," Snead said. "That doesn't happen often." He added that he would show up to that game not as a general manager but as a guy watching something on Netflix.

Rich's larger argument is that this stopped being a Los Angeles story a while ago. It is not even an NFC West story.

"It affects the entire NFL," he said.

Which means Seattle gets to use it, and Rich fully expects the defending champions to do exactly that. This is a team that stacked helmets like pelts on a wall under Mike Macdonald, a detail nobody talked about until it leaked during Super Bowl week, and then beat the Rams twice, once controversially and once in the biggest game the NFC had to offer.

Fine, Rich said. All 31 other teams get to use it, because the media has already decided the Rams have the best chance to win the Super Bowl, and if Donald returns, maybe to do what the Patriots could not do years ago and go unbeaten. Rich called it stupid to even say the words. He said them anyway.

Lost in the noise is the roster math. An MVP quarterback is back. Most of the roster is back. Garrett is added. And nobody has mentioned Trent McDuffie, acquired from Kansas City for the Rams' own first-round pick, the same pick everyone complained did not bring back help for this year.

When Donald first retired, the fantasy was that he might raise his hand Eric Weddle style, get a phone call, come back for the playoffs. This one is different. As it was put on the show, this is flat out real.