You can’t replace Aaron Donald, but what the Rams did in the draft is amazing

With only one first round pick, the Rams have four impressive young defensive linemen

It’s been said 2.5 million times this offseason that you can’t replace Aaron Donald. That’s true, but let’s pretend we live in an alternate universe where the Rams had been able to draft Aidan Hutchinson and right now they have a 24-year-old defensive lineman dominating the league with 6.5 sacks in three games and almost 30 in his career. Maybe Hutchinson wouldn’t have “replaced” Aaron Donald, but fans would be feeling really damn good about the next generation.

Well, even without a top-2 pick or a top-10 pick and with only one first round pick in the last eight years, the L.A. Rams have done a really impressive job of building a non-Aaron Donald defensive line that fans can get excited about.

And it starts with the two day two picks from 2023 who are currently leading all 2023 draft class members with 10 sacks each.

Without a pick until 36th overall, last year the Rams addressed the offensive line (to the delight of almost all Rams fans) with Steve Avila in the second round, taking him over edge rushers such as Derick Hall and Keion White, both of whom are having success in the early going of 2024.

When the Rams were back on the clock at pick 77, they selected Byron Young, a player with all the tools but was also 3-5 years older than a lot of his classmates.

Young was the 24th outside linebacker, defensive end, or defensive tackle picked in the 2023 draft. He wasn’t even the first “Byron Young” drafted! The Raiders picked defensive tackle Byron Young with pick 70. (That Young has four tackles and no sacks in six games.)

12 picks later, Les Snead added defensive tackle Kobie Turner at 3.89, making him the 27th “pass rusher” or “defensive linemen” in the 2023 class.

So these two players were not drafted in the top-20 of the “front-7” players in the 2023 draft and yet with 10 sacks each, they lead all players in the 2023 draft. Including Hall and White, of course. But also including Will Anderson, Will McDonald, Jalen Carter, Tyree Wilson, Lukas Van Ness, Bryan Bresee, Calijah Kancey, BJ Ojulari, and so on. This order will change over time, but it’s got to feel good that without using top-75 picks, Snead was able to add two players to his front-seven that the team is happy with as starters.

Turner was the bigger star during their rookie seasons, but Young has turned it up in year two and he already had a good first season. Here’s how Blaine Grisak described his performance against the 49ers:

That was not the case on Sunday agains the 49ers. Young had four pressures with a quarterback hit and also had a forced fumble. He had an 18.2 win percentage via PFF which was the first time this season that he eclipsed the 10 percent mark.

On his strip sack at the end of the first half, Young uses a speed chop to beat the right tackle and then uses his length to knock the ball loose. The hope here now is that Young can build on this pass rush performance. Young disappeared toward the end of last year and needs to continue to make an impact.

As if that wasn’t enough, why not add a sprinkle on top: Seventh round pick Desjuan Johnson’s 2 career sacks is still more than first round picks Nolan Smith, Mazi Smith, and Felix Anudike-Uzomah, as well as second rounder Keeanu Benton.

With Young, Turner, and Johnson, the Rams turned three draft picks that might usually be one “OK” starter, one backup, and one practice squad player, into three legitimately important players. And it’s still early enough for someone like Nick Hampton, a fifth round outside linebacker, to develop into someone having an impact for the Rams.

But just in case you thought that Snead relaxed after stealing Young, Turner, and potentially Johnson in the 2023 draft, the reaction was instead the complete opposite.

After Donald retired, the Rams knew that the work they did in 2023, as well as picking defensive tackle Bobby Brown III in 2021 and knowing they could get more out of him, as well as Michael Hoecht and Hampton, was not enough.

The Rams then drafted edge rusher Jared Verse with their first first round pick since 2016. That was almost immediately followed (a day later) by being overly aggressive in trading up for Verse’s college teammate Braden Fiske, the team’s seventh defensive line/edge rusher pick since 2023. On day three, fifth round pick Brennan Jackson made it eight in two years and sixth round pick Tyler Davis made it nine!

Suddenly a defensive line without Aaron Donald for the first time since 2013 is starting to look like…Well, it just looks like its own unit. One that necessitates NO comparison to a team that used to have Aaron Donald. This is not the post-Aaron Donald Rams, this is just a version of the Rams defensive line that fans can get excited about without having to remember that 12 months ago L.A. had the best defensive tackle in NFL history on the roster.

Instead, this is now just a defense—a bad defense so far, but one that did hold the 49ers out of the end zone in Week 3 when they absolutely needed it—that is young, cheap, learning how to win in the NFL, and probably still a lot better than they have ANY business being given how little draft capital and free agent money was spent on it. The cheapest defense in the NFL, probably the youngest defensive in the NFL, yet somehow not a defense that needs 9 or 10 players to be replaced.

We could look back at the worst Rams teams of the 2004-2016 era and see so many names that did not last for longer than one or two seasons as a starter. Just very forgettable players to most people who didn’t follow the Rams religiously at the time. That might be the case with a couple of the Rams starters, but the Young, Turner, Verse, Fiske types are forming into mainstays. Key cogs to a defense that could be good in a year and could be great in 12-24 months.

That’s not to say that players I didn’t just name couldn’t also be that: Tyler Davis has quietly played 32 snaps to start his career, Hoecht continues to be a dog, Brown is arguably just starting to find his footing in the league after several hiccups, Johnson has gone farther than most “Mr. Irrelevant” players, and it is too soon to say what becomes of Jackson or Hampton.

Even Neville Gallimore, the latest addition to the unit, is only 27. He’s one year older than Byron Young and he got into Sunday’s win with three tackles and a QB hit of his own.

You can’t replace Donald with one pick. You can’t replace him with nine draft picks. But if you make nine draft picks in two years and over half of them turn out to be steals, maybe you can at least start the post-AD era off on the right foot.