Surprisingly, PFF likes Aaron Donald for some reason

Can Aaron Donald’s pressures make him NFL Defensive Player of the Year?

Alden Gonzalez

http://www.espn.com/blog/los-angeles-rams/post/_/id/36664/can-aaron-donalds-pressures-make-him-defensive-player-of-the-year

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — Aaron Donald started rattling off a list of sacks he failed to secure. There was that one against the Dallas Cowboys, another against the New York Giants, two that he remembered against the Seattle Seahawks, and countless others against the Minnesota Vikings and former teammate Case Keenum.

He still thinks about them.

“All the time,” Donald said. “All the time.”

The 2017 season is 12 weeks old, and Donald once again is making a compelling case to be considered the game’s best defensive player. But you wouldn’t know it by his sack total. The Los Angeles Rams’ fourth-year defensive tackle has six sacks, which is enough to lead his team but not enough to even rank within the NFL’s top 25.

It’s a modest total, but Donald’s impact is best measured by the number of times he pressures the opposing quarterback.

Donald already has generated 62 quarterback pressures, a statistic used by Pro Football Focus that combines sacks, hits and hurries. That’s seven more than the next interior lineman (the Cincinnati Bengals’ Geno Atkins) and four more than the next defensive player of any kind (the Los Angeles Chargers’ Joey Bosa). Donald leads by this measure even though he spent the entire summer holding out, didn’t play in Week 1, wasn’t himself in Week 2 — “I don’t even count that game,” Donald said — and plays a position that makes it excruciatingly difficult to manufacture pressure.

“It doesn’t surprise me at all,” Rams edge rusher Matt Longacre said. “We’ve never seen anybody pressure the quarterback as much as he does.”

But will it lead to Donald being crowned the NFL’s Defensive Player of the Year?

The odds appear to be against it.

The award, voted on by a 50-person panel and presented by The Associated Press, traditionally goes to players who are among the league’s leaders in traditional statistics such as interceptions, tackles and sacks. Even a transcendent player such as Donald — an interior lineman who will inherently have lower sack totals, regardless of ability and skill — can suffer because of it.

“I think it can happen, and I think our voters are savvy enough to realize how good a player Aaron Donald is,” said Barry Wilner, an AP football writer who has overseen the Defensive Player of the Year Award for two decades. “But we’re also in a very statistics-based world, where on defense, sacks and interceptions seem to be the calling card.”

Four defensive tackles have been named AP Defensive Player of the Year since the sack became an official stat in 1982, and all four of them — Warren Sapp, Dana Stubblefield, Cortez Kennedy and Keith Millard — did so after finishing within the top 10 in sacks. Wade Phillips was the Philadelphia Eagles’ defensive coordinator when Hall of Famer Reggie White was named defensive player of the year after a 21-sack season in 1987, but Phillips helped move White from defensive tackle to defensive end.

“You’ve got a better chance outside,” Phillips said, “because you can’t get doubled as much.”

White was a good fit outside at 6-foot-5 and 300 pounds. Donald, 6-foot-1 and 280 pounds, always will fit best on the interior, where Phillips admits it’s “awfully hard” to continually be among the league’s leaders in sacks.

But Donald, whose career high in sacks was 11 in 2015, doesn’t see it that way.

“You just have to work a little harder for it because there’s less space, a lot less room to work with,” the 26-year-old said. “I feel like I can get it.”

Donald brought up La’Roi Glover, who racked up 17 sacks as a defensive tackle in 2000. Sapp, Stubblefield, Kennedy and Millard found ways to ocassionally get it done, too. So did Hall of Famer John Randle, a man Donald studied intently when he reached the NFL.

“To be the best, you have to try to do what the best did and try to surpass those guys,” said Donald, who plays with the phrase “Hard Work Pays Off” written on the back of his cleats. “It’s work. But I’m in this business to work, not just to have my individual success, but to try to do my little part to help my team to try to have success, too, because it’s about winning.”

Donald was invited to the Pro Bowl after each of his first three seasons and was named first-team All-Pro after each of his past two. His 34 sacks since the start of 2014 leads defensive tackles and is tied for 10th among all positions. Pressure-wise, Donald is in the midst of his best season yet. He’s on pace to finish with 90, which would top his previous high of 82 from 2016, according to Pro Football Focus. Donald ranked third in pressures that season.

“I definitely want to get the sack,” Donald said. “But I learned in this league that quarterback pressures and quarterback hits are as big as a sack because you’re back there putting the pressure on them, not letting the quarterback get comfortable, and you’re affecting the game.”

Donald’s next opponent, Arizona Cardinals coach Bruce Arians, called him “the most dynamic inside player in the NFL,” and that is no stretch.

“He gets those outside guys a lot of sacks because if they stay outside, the quarterback is just getting flushed out to them,” Arians said. “He can wreck the game in a heartbeat.”

Phillips was asked which players have surprised him in his first season as Rams defensive coordinator and answered “Aaron Donald.”

“Because he’s better than everybody, and I didn’t know he was better than everybody,” Phillips said. “I thought he was good, but I didn’t know he was better than everybody.”

Those who watch Donald closely tend to have that takeaway, even if traditional numbers don’t illustrate it. Wilner likes to believe the voting panel considers all stats, traditional and contemporary, in addition to gauging with their eyes and inquiring from opposing players.

“But the voters have total freedom about how they want to choose the winners of these,” Wilner said, “and it often comes down to sacks and interceptions.”

Donald didn’t end his holdout — a holdout that still hasn’t yielded the lucrative contract he seeks — until the Saturday before the season opener. He didn’t play in that game and admitted he was rusty in the team’s second. Donald said he was “cleaner” in the third, “but I just wasn’t comfortable with my technique.”

Really, it wasn’t until Week 4 that Donald began to feel like himself again. But Pro Football Focus — an analytics-based site that had Donald graded as the second-best player after 2016 and ranked as the NFL’s best player heading into 2017 — still has him affecting the quarterback more often than anybody else.

Someday, even if not this season, it might land him the AP Defensive Player of the Year Award.

“You always want your hard work to pay off and be seen as something like that,” Donald said. “It’s definitely a goal of mine. I don’t keep thinking about it, but it’s definitely a goal.”

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from: http://www.ocregister.com/2017/12/01/aaron-donald-is-just-as-dominant-as-ever-for-rams-defense/

Donald’s lack of flashy stats is the ultimate compliment. Offensive linemen double team him. Quarterbacks sprint away from him. Offensive coordinators scheme plays away from him. This could be, even though stats betray it, the most dominant of Donald’s four NFL seasons.

“He’s better than everybody,” Rams first-year defensive coordinator Wade Phillips said, “and I didn’t know he was better than everybody. I thought he was good, but I didn’t know he was better than everybody.”

Some of the stats are there. Donald, for instance, has forced three fumbles in 10 games this season. He forced a total of four in his first 48 NFL games. Unofficially, Donald leads the NFL in quarterback pressures, and analytics websites consistently rank him as the league’s top defensive lineman.

Then there’s the eye test. Donald missed all of training camp, and the first week of the season, because of a contract holdout, and took a while to play his way into game shape. Starting with the Oct. 15 game at Jacksonville, Donald has recorded five sacks and three forced fumbles in six games.

“It doesn’t take a coach to see that,” Phillips said. “If you just watch him during the game or watch a film of the game, the whole game you just watch him the whole game and you see how he dominates, even against two blockers. Those great players, they obviously are going to affect the game and he does that.”

Donald had a virtuoso performance last Sunday against New Orleans. He tied his season high with five tackles, sacked quarterback Drew Brees on the Saints’ third play and set the tone on a day when the Rams held the high-powered Saints offense to 20 points.

“Any time you go up against a quarterback like that, you want to get to him early,” Donald said. “I thought we did a good job. Multiple guys were flying around making plays. It was a big key for us to get some pressure on him, and that’s what we did.”

The challenge is different this week, with Sunday’s game at Arizona, because the Cardinals are on their third quarterback of the season, Blaine Gabbert. Donald sacked Carson Palmer when the teams first met in October in London, and Donald enters Sunday with 34 sacks in 58 career NFL games.

That’s a good ratio, particularly for a defensive tackle in a 3-4 system that also sees two linebackers near the line of the scrimmage. Donald certainly has the ability to burst through the line and make a sack, but more often, he’s providing pressure and tying up offensive linemen so the Rams can get outside pressure.