The Rams Built a Two-Man Wrecking Crew. They've Never Had Both Men at Once.

Here is the number that reframes everything the Rams thought they were building this offseason: zero. As in, the number of regular-season snaps Myles Garrett and Aaron Donald have shared on the same defensive line. Garrett is on Injured Reserve. Donald is active. The partnership that was supposed to redefine Los Angeles's defense in 2026 has existed entirely in press releases and imagination.

I've been tracking this story since training camp, when Garrett missed four practices with lower-body soreness and the alarm bells were already ringing. The front office moved to sign Donald partly as insurance, partly as genuine upgrade — two Hall-of-Fame-caliber interior disruptors collapsing the pocket from different angles, the kind of combination that forces offensive coordinators to lose sleep. What they have instead is a relay race where the baton never actually gets handed off. Donald runs his leg alone. Garrett watches from the sideline. The theoretical sum of those two forces has never been tested against a real opponent.

What makes this particularly costly is the context the 2025 season established. The Rams won only four of nine games decided by a possession or less — a 44% rate against a 71% overall win rate. That gap, nearly 27 percentage points, is where seasons go to die. Close games are won in the trenches on third-and-seven, on the final drive, on the pressure that forces a bad throw. A healthy, paired Donald-and-Garrett front was supposed to be the Rams' answer to that specific problem. Instead, Braden Fiske — five sacks in 18 games last season, a legitimate piece but not a centerpiece — and Josaiah Stewart are being asked to generate the kind of consistent disruption that requires two dominant forces, not one and a half.

The defensive depth chart tells the rest of the story without editorializing. Kobie Turner, Desjuan Johnson, and Bill Murray rotate at tackle. The linebacker corps behind Nate Landman thins quickly. Kam Curl is a legitimate safety anchor — 149 tackles and three interceptions last season — but a secondary plays better when quarterbacks are already uncomfortable, and quarterbacks are only uncomfortable when someone is getting home. With Garrett on IR for the foreseeable future, the Rams are asking Donald to be that someone, every snap, at an age when even the greatest players need complementary pressure to stay effective.

My read is that the Rams' front office understood the risk of building around two veterans with injury histories and bet that the upside justified it. That bet may still pay off when Garrett returns. But the schedule does not pause for recoveries, and the close-game problem that ended their 2025 season in the wild card is still sitting there, unresolved, waiting for a defensive line that has not yet existed to solve it.