got this off of another message board.
Now don’t kill the messenger here:
Aaron Donald could be the next JJ Watt Sam Monson explains how Aaron Donald is setting a near-record pace in just his second season
Long article with lots of multimedia so I’ll take just a few quotes. A good read.
Aaron Donald finished his rookie season as our top-ranked defensive tackle with a grade of +34.4. He had been at or around the top of the rankings all season, and by the end of it had created a significant enough gap between himself and the next best players – Gerald McCoy and Ndamukong Suh. Leading the league at any position as a rookie is impressive, in fact it’s absurd, but Donald has managed to take a gigantic leap forward from even that point this year.
Right now, Donald is already 59 percent of the way to eclipsing that grade … after just three games!
Donald has amassed a grade of +20.4 through three block-crushing performances. The highest grade we have ever seen from a defensive tackle after three games before this season was the +15.2 posted by Albert Haynesworth back in 2007. The best grade at the position after three games averages +9.6 during the PFF era. Donald is double that. He is playing on another level to anything we have seen at his position and is so far out ahead of the pack we need to start looking at otherworldly comparisons for him — like J.J. Watt.
It took a while for people to accept that Watt was a generationally great player, but eventually there was no denying it. We assumed that we wouldn’t see another come along for a couple of decades, but it’s possible we are seeing one enter the league only three seasons later: Aaron Donald.
It’s fitting that Atkins is back to his best just as Donald hits his stride, because the two players are very much alike. At a time when the NFL was looking for freakish, giant defensive tackles that could still move well, Atkins (6-1, 293 pounds) and Donald (6-1, 285 pounds) scared teams off by being “too small.” What both are proving, however, is that the league was overvaluing size and mass, and that if you are quick and strong enough you can be a dominant force even if you’re not carrying an extra 40 pounds of weight.
The NFL equates size in the trenches with strength, but when you’re talking about guys this big they’re all monstrously strong, and you’re actually just confusing strength with mass. World record powerlifter Eric Lilliebridge only weighs around 275 pounds, and he can squat almost 1,000 pounds. That’s like lifting Marcel Dareus, Haloti Ngata and Ndamukong Suh all at once. Cian Healy, one of the strongest men in world rugby, weighs just 254 pounds but is renowned as a freak in the gym, lifting more weight than far larger men can cope with. Donald and Atkins do not lack for strength because they don’t weigh 330 pounds; they just lack for comparative mass, which physics will tell you only really matters when it comes to head-on collisions at speed.
The key to both players is that they don’t run into much larger bodies without shifting things in their favor, either by attacking a gap or by winning the leverage battle and getting underneath their blocker at the point of impact. If all Donald did was stand up and run into a guard, being 285 pounds would be a problem, but since he doesn’t, it’s actually far more of an asset than it is a hindrance.
While people might look at the result and say they succeeded, the truth isn’t quite that simple. While Donald “only” got one sack, we have drawn up multiple other plays in which he was a destructive force in this article. Pass-rushing alone he had three more pressures and four more defeated blocks where the ball was gone before he could convert it into pressure.
Right now Aaron Donald is as close to unblockable as it gets in the NFL. He has outplayed Watt, and every other interior defender through three weeks of the season, and is on pace to rival the best seasons we have seen from Watt. Donald isn’t just good, he’s utterly terrifying, and quite possibly a generational talent in his own right.
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