Rams defensive tackle Aaron Donald held out all through training camp and into Week One of the regular season last year, but he eventually reported without a new contract. This year, the Rams want to keep that from happening.
Donald is heading into the final year of his rookie contract, and Rams G.M. Les Snead says he and Donald’s representatives have agreed on a schedule for getting a deal done.
“We came up with a nice timeline that we’re going to work with, and we’ll get to work and try to hammer this thing out. The theme will always be that we want Aaron to be a Ram a long time,” Snead said.
Of course, having a timeline for getting a deal done is not the same as getting a deal done. Donald may want a contract that beats the best deal ever given a defensive tackle: Ndamukong Suh’s contract with the Dolphins, which ended up paying him $60 million over three years before he was released yesterday. The Rams may say they’re not going to pay Donald $60 million over the first three years of a deal because they could just keep him for the $6.8 million he’s under contract for this year, franchise him for about $15 million next year, and then franchise him again for about $18 million in 2020. That would be a total of about $40 million over three years, not $60 million over three years.
So while Snead sounds confident about the timeline, there’s surely a lot of work to get done before the contract is finalized -- and a possibility that Donald will hold out of training camp for the second consecutive year.
