The case for the 2026 Los Angeles Rams as the NFL's most feared team starts with Aaron Donald and Myles Garrett on the same defensive line. What complicates it is that Donald, 35, coming out of retirement, has not played a competitive down yet, and the Rams open tonight in Melbourne without him as the team gives him time to ramp up.
Shawne Merriman, the All-Pro linebacker who played for the San Diego Chargers and Buffalo Bills, did not shade his assessment when asked about the pairing. "Just insane," he told OutKick. "Every week will be a pick-your-poison situation. Who do you want to focus on? Because the other one is going to make plays."
The mechanism offensive coordinators have to solve
What Merriman describes is a resource-allocation problem with no clean answer. An offensive line can shade attention toward Garrett or toward Donald. Doing both at the required level simultaneously is, by Merriman's read, impossible. He played inside that arithmetic himself: he knew chip blocks and slide protections were coming his way because he was the edge threat. Donald and Garrett split that attention in half. Leave either one in a true one-on-one, Merriman said, "it's going to be damaging."
There is a more specific mechanism Merriman flagged for Garrett. In Cleveland, Garrett never played with a lead. He never got to rush freely inside a lopsided score, when opposing offenses have no choice but to throw. With reigning MVP Matthew Stafford, who secured an extension worth up to $60 million with incentives, running the offense across the line of scrimmage, those leads become plausible week to week. Merriman thinks the result could unlock a version of Garrett that opponents have not yet seen. As for Donald, Merriman put a precise qualifier on his confidence: at 35 and returning from retirement, Donald is "still a top three player at 80% of what he is." He led the league in sacks in 2018 with 20.5 and totaled 111 over his career.
The counterargument
Merriman raised it himself. Football is "a finnicky sport," he said, and super teams assembled on paper have come apart before. Donald sits out the Melbourne opener. The Rams lost the NFC Championship Game to the Seattle Seahawks last season and watched Seattle advance to the Super Bowl. The gap between roster construction and winning a title has swallowed more than a few loaded rosters, and nothing on the field counts yet.
On balance, the read-through from this defensive pairing to a championship is a projection Merriman was careful to keep conditional. His stated floor for the Rams is "at the bare minimum, back in the NFC Championship Game this year." That is where the sourced facts leave the story, for now.