Assault.
Aaron Donald removing two Bengals players helmets and using them as weapons is a terrifying as it gets
Prior to last year's Super Bowl, the L.A. Rams and Cincinnati Bengals did not have much history to speak of. They had only played each other 14 times in NFL history, the 15th being the Super Bowl and the Rams victory putting the lifetime series at 8-7, Bengals. There was no bad blood, just a handful of (probably) meaningless regular season games between the two franchises that nobody remembers.
But make no mistake, the two teams have history now. Until the Bengals finally go on to win a Super Bowl, the Rams will be remembered as the team that stopped them from reaching the mountaintop. If there ain't bad blood after that, you don't have a pulse.
Case in point, this training camp fight from Thursday at a Rams-Bengals joint practice, which, in retrospect, was probably a bad idea. During the fight, Aaron Donald, a gigantic mass of a human, managed to rip off the helmets of two Bengals players and use them as weapons, Myles Garrett style:
Before you even say it (we already sort of did), yes, there will be comparisons to what Garrett did. And the fact that Garrett was suspended indefinitely, which ultimately came out to the final six games of the 2019 NFL season. He was also villified, and top ESPN NFL reporter Adam Schefter even tweeted the word "Assault." in reference to the video of Garrett swinging Mason Rudoplh's own helmet at him, which has since become a hilarious running joke on Twitter, naturally.
Is what Donald did worthy of the "Assault." treatment? Yes, probably, and by probably we mean definitely. That's some absolutely terrifying and downright dangerous sh-t. But the key difference between this situation and the Garrett one is the Garrett one happened on a Thursday night on national television in the peak of the NFL season, whereas this one is an all-out brawl in a joint training camp practice. All-out brawls in joint training camp practice are par for the course. They shouldn't ever involve helmets being used as weapons, but sh-t happens on a hot summer day when you finally start hitting people that aren't your own teammates. Final verdict: definite assault but anything goes when it's not an official game on national TV.
UPDATE: Looks like our boy Schefty has weighed in:
There you have it. That's assault, brotha.