https://www.latimes.com/sports/nfl/la-sp-nfl-week-17-farmer-20181227-story.html
If Michael Strahan’s NFL season sack record has to fall — and it eventually will — the Hall of Fame defensive end wants Aaron Donald to topple it.
“The sack record is fantastic and it’s great,” Strahan said Thursday by phone. “But I hope Aaron does break it. There have been guys who have gotten close, but I just want it to be a good guy who breaks it. Not some jerk, or some guy who doesn’t care about it or take pride in what he does and just kind of luckily rolls through.
“I want somebody who represents the NFL in the right way. He’s that guy.”
At Rams headquarters Thursday, Donald couldn’t help but feel flattered to hear that.
“Any time you get a Hall of Fame player that even knows my name, you’re going to be pumped up about that,” he said. “So it means a lot coming from a guy like that.”
It’s far from a given that Donald will even match what Strahan did for the New York Giants during the 2001 season, when he accumulated 22½ sacks.
With one game to play, at home Sunday against the San Francisco 49ers, Donald has 19½. So he needs three to tie the record, matching the production he had last Sunday against Arizona. But he has shown such games aren’t once-in-a-career outings; he had four sacks against the 49ers when the Rams played them in Week 7.
“It’s something that’s out there,” Rams coach Sean McVay said of the record. “You don’t acknowledge [it] in the team meetings. You talk about guys playing to the best of their ability, and doing different things to hopefully make plays like that. But that’s not something that we’re saying, like, ‘This is the key to the game for us to be able to win as a team.’”
