Donald, Duck! The Loaded Rams, Plus Raiders and Falcons QB Battles

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Mina Kimes** (0:31)
Welcome back to The Mina Kimes Show featuring Lenny, and welcome back to Aaron Donald. Also, another Aaron. I didn't see that. Aaron Schatz. Welcome back to the show, man.
Who would you say is a bigger return, you or Aaron Donald?

**Aaron Schatz** (0:47)
It's Aaron Donald. I was only on IR for four days. He's been out for two years.

**Mina Kimes** (0:53)
It's good to have you back on. For those who don't know, Aaron, is editor-in-chief your title? Is that the correct?

**Aaron Schatz** (0:59)
Chief Analytics Officer, FTN.

**Mina Kimes** (1:02)
FTN Fantasy, I've mentioned this many times on our show. Excellent resource for NFL stat. Truly, I feel like untapped by a lot of people. But they also have the FTN almanac, used to be the football outsiders' almanac. Again, I think every year that I've done. There it is. JSN on the front. I love it.
Am I the blurb on the front?

**Aaron Schatz** (1:20)
You are one of the blurbs along with John Harbaugh. Yes.

**Mina Kimes** (1:23)
My peer, John Harbaugh.
Every year, I tell you guys to buy it if you are serious about football, if you're serious about fantasy, if you're serious about anything. Honestly, it is an incredible resource. In fact, this same week, I'm doing my annual team draft with Michael Jr. I always lean very heavily on FTN projections for that because you guys look at schedule, strength schedule, opponent, all of that. Fantastic resource. Where can folks buy it?

**Aaron Schatz** (1:49)
You can buy it at ftnfantasy.com/almanac and there is a sample chapter there. So you can get an idea of what you're getting into if you've never bought it before. If you want the physical copy that I just held up, you search for FTN Football Almanac 2026 on Amazon.

**Mina Kimes** (2:06)
Outstanding.
All right. So as I mentioned, Aaron Donald is back and today we're going to talk about that. It's the news of the week at the moment. I want to talk about it though, not just through the lens of, wow, Aaron Donald, that sucks for the rest of the league. But I want to talk about what it means, what it means for the Rams defense and also how offenses might game plan for what can you do, I think is an interesting direction to take this conversation in. We're also going to talk about the Raiders. It hasn't been announced yet, but widely rumored to be starting the season with Kurt Cousins, Atlanta's quarterback decision, which again, hopefully it happens during the course of the show, hasn't been made, might drag out. It's a very weird one that we'll get to. And then two big, I won't call them suspensions because they're not, but two big pieces of NFL news, Josh Jacobs, the Packers running back and Jonathon Cooper, the Broncos edge put on the commissioner's exempt list. Those to me were the biggest pieces of NFL news late last week or over the weekend. But let's start with Donald. So he's back. The last time we saw him, it was 2023 It wasn't that long ago. I was looking up my notes from that season and his retirement. And the last thing I posted was a picture of him being triple-teamed and double-teamed and triple-teamed, though.
And it's unlikely he's going to face that as much this season. We'll get to that. But when he last played in 2023, amongst all defensive tackles, he was first in ESPN's pass rush win metric. He was second in total pressures. He was first in hurries. So let's just start there before we get to the other pieces of this Rams discussion. Aaron, this is a player who's been away from football for a couple of seasons. Do you think it's silly or...
Silly is the wrong word. Overly optimistic for Rams fans to presume he's going to be the same guy. And even if he's not, doesn't matter.

**Aaron Schatz** (4:05)
I think that it's very unlikely that he's the same guy.
But he can be most of that guy. I'm less worried that he's been away for two years and more worried that he's just two years older.

**Mina Kimes** (4:19)
Yeah.

**Aaron Schatz** (4:20)
Because if they don't feel like he's prepped, they're not going to put him on the field in week one. They feel like he's prepped.