This LA Rams team must now step up for DL Aaron Donald

When the LA Rams advanced to the Divisional Round of the NFL Playoffs last year, the Rams defense faced playing a very important game on the road in the cold with an injured Aaron Donald.  But Donald was only a fraction of himself, and his performance in that cold game at Lambeau Field was not quite what many of us hoped it might be.

The Rams lost that game by a score of 32-18, but how the team viewed that performance seemed to light a fire in the entire organization.  If you want to mark the trail of what happened next, check out our From tears to trades: How Aaron Donald lit a fire in the LA Rams organization article that spells out how the team reacted, and what they did about it.

Must become more competitive

The bottom line came down to the fact that the LA Rams were simply not competitive enough amidst the prime of Aaron Donald’s career. That mobilized the entire team to become more competitive. Or rather, to make moves to make this roster more competitive.

So the question now is, did the LA Rams become more competitive, or simply more patchworked and more expensive? Is this a one-year run, or has the organization laid the foundation for a roster that can be aligned to stay together and compete for the foreseeable future?

Well, first things first. The first hurdle to overcome for this assembled-on-the-fly roster was the Divisional Round of the NFL Playoffs. The team managed to do something that no team has done in the past two years. The LA Rams defeated the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and their quarterback Tom Brady in the playoffs. While that is just the start of what needs to happen, it is a good start indeed.