Six Weeks Without Garrett Turns a Partnership Into a Solo Act

Aaron Donald is active. That fact, sitting in the injury report alongside Myles Garrett's Injured Reserve designation, tells you exactly how badly the Rams' defensive math has broken down. The plan was never for Donald to carry this pass rush. The plan was for two generational wreckers to split the attention of every offensive line in the NFC, each one making the other more dangerous by virtue of existing. Garrett on Injured Reserve doesn't just remove a player. It removes the entire premise.

I've been writing about this defensive architecture for weeks now, and the through-line keeps getting harder to ignore. The Rams built their 2026 defense around a dual-threat concept — a returning Hall of Famer anchoring the interior while Garrett terrorized edges — that assumed both men would be upright and functional. Garrett missed four practices before training camp ended. Now he's on IR with a lower-body injury and a six-week absence ahead of him. The architecture didn't collapse when he got hurt. It had already been compromised. The IR designation just made it official.

What that leaves is Donald, active and available, being asked to generate the kind of disruptive pressure that requires a complementary threat to work. Pass rushers operate on attention economies — when an offense has to account for two elite disruptors, the blocking math becomes impossible. Remove one, and every offensive coordinator in the league can dedicate an extra body to the other. Donald is one of the most dominant interior forces the sport has ever produced, but he spent years benefiting from a Rams defensive line that made it genuinely difficult to scheme around him. The version of that line that exists right now, with Garrett sidelined, Braden Fiske as the most productive returning pass rusher in the grounding with five sacks last season, and Josaiah Stewart as the edge option I've been scrutinizing for weeks, is a different animal entirely.

Fiske's five sacks in 18 games last year represent real production, and Stewart has the tools to develop into something meaningful — I've written about both possibilities at length. But "developing into something" is a different proposition than "providing the kind of credible exterior threat that keeps blockers honest when Aaron Donald is collapsing the pocket." Those are two different standards, and the Rams need the second one right now, not the first. Without Garrett, opposing offensive coordinators can double Donald, chip him with a back, and dare the Rams' supporting cast to beat them. That dare has been sitting on the table since the IR designation landed.

The deeper problem is that this situation exposes a fragility the Rams' 12-5 record from last season obscured. That team won only 44 percent of its close games — four of nine decided by a possession or fewer — and got bounced in the wild-card round despite Stafford's historic 52-touchdown season. The offense was elite enough to paper over the defense's limitations in blowouts. In tight games, when the defense needed a stop on third-and-seven to preserve a lead, the limitations showed. A pass rush operating as a one-man show is exactly the kind of structural weakness that surfaces in the fourth quarter of a one-score game. My read is that the Rams cannot afford six more weeks of this arrangement and expect a different postseason result. Donald is extraordinary. He was never supposed to be sufficient on his own.