Rams star no fan of empty stadiums
Donald: ‘I don’t see how you can play a game without fans’
LOS ANGELES — Aaron Donald is not thrilled about the prospect of playing football without fans.
The Los Angeles Rams’ star defensive lineman doesn’t like the idea of playing an NFL season in front of empty seats, saying it “wouldn’t be fun to me.”
“I feel like you need fans to play the game,” Donald added Thursday on a video conference call from his offseason home in Pittsburgh. “I don’t see how you could play a game without the fans. I feel like that takes out the excitement and the fun out of the game.”
Donald realizes his opinion won’t carry much weight if the coronavirus pandemic forces the NFL to take extraordinary measures to provide a TV product to the world. But the six-time Pro Bowl pick is among those sportsmen worldwide who don’t really see the point of continuing with their professions while large crowds are unable to gather safely.
“I feel like the fans pick you up,” Donald said. “The fans are what makes the game exciting. The fans would give you that extra juice when you’re tired and fatigued. When you make that big play and you hear 80,000 fans going crazy, that pumps you up.”
The possible realities of a pandemic year are coming home for Donald and the Rams, who haven’t reopened their training complex while conducting their spring work online. Donald is used to missing offseason workouts with his teammates, thanks to two contract holdouts that eventually ended with his mammoth sixyear, $135 million extension in August 2018.
Donald usually spends much of his offseason working out at Pitt, where the Aaron Donald Football Performance Center is at his disposal for obvious reasons.
But with the university shut down due to the pandemic, Donald said he has been working out “back where it all started” in The Dungeon — his nickname for the tiny basement of his father’s home.
Donald has still been busy with his school, however: He recently finished his communications degree, joining his brother and sister as college graduates.
“I’ve been taking classes for the past couple of years here and there, online classes,” said Donald, who headed to the NFL in 2014. “It’s a promise I made to my mom and dad. When I got drafted, I promised my mom and dad that I’d still get the degree, because that’s what they wanted. It took a while, but I accomplished it. They were proud of me.”
Donald will head back to LA eventually, but he is getting plenty of screen time with his new teammates and with the Rams’ coaching staff, including new defensive coordinator Brandon
Staley. Donald is optimistic about the direction of the Rams’ defense, although he is getting eager to get onto the field so he can learn Staley’s schemes with his teammates.
Staley, who just got his first coordinator job in the league, realizes he has an enormous advantage in his task with likely the best defensive lineman in the world at the center of his planning.
“My mom is a teacher, and she always said, ‘You’ve got to get your best students to perform better,’” Staley said. “It’s easy to take the best students for granted . ... We all know what he’s capable of, but how can we help him do his job better and maybe lift some weight off his shoulders? We want to make sure we get him in as many isolations as possible. If we can get him against one (blocker) as opposed to two, then our odds of being successful go through the roof.”