By Gus "Walk-Off" Fields
The ovation started before Aaron Donald did anything at all. He was simply standing on the SoFi Stadium sideline Sunday night, in uniform for the first time since the end of the 2023 season, and the crowd noise told the story before a single snap.
The Rams fed off it. Los Angeles, still stinging from a Week 1 loss, put together a rout of the Giants that looked nothing like a team searching for answers. Matthew Stafford did his part too, throwing his 426th career touchdown pass to Davante Adams to move past Philip Rivers into sixth place on the NFL's all-time list — a number that belongs in the same sentence as the game's great arms, and one Stafford reached with the matter-of-fact efficiency that's defined his late-career renaissance.
For New York, the night unraveled early. Rookie quarterback Jaxson Dart, the centerpiece of the Giants' rebuild, limped off after a hard hit to his left knee in the first quarter and did not return, leaving the offense to scramble against a Rams defense that had Donald's presence to lean on, even in a limited role. New York simply couldn't keep pace once the game got away from it.
There's a lesson in that SoFi crowd's reaction worth sitting with: some players don't need to make a tackle to change a game. They just need to walk back onto the field. Donald did that Sunday, and Los Angeles looked like itself again because of it.
Final score's the last thing that mattered here.
— Compiled from reporting by ESPN.
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