Aidan Donald has a love-hate relationship with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches: He once loved them, and now he hates them.
Either way, they have become a necessity — and, as far as he’s concerned, a necessary evil — for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s starting left tackle.
The 6-foot-3 Donald, who played not only football but basketball at Lebanon High School, arrived at UTC in the fall of 2023 weighing close to 245 pounds. He had been pretty heavily recruited until college coaches realized his size didn’t make him a natural fit on the offensive line.
UTC coach Rusty Wright and his staff, though, decided to take a chance on Donald, and once he signed with the Mocs, that meant at least a year of trying to toss as much additional weight on his frame as possible to make him a viable option to play.
He redshirted during his first fall with the Mocs, played in eight games last year and was in the lineup last weekend when the Mocs opened the season with a 45-10 loss at Memphis. He’s now at 273 pounds, but maintaining that weight during the season still means four meals a day, plus a couple of snacks along the way.
And that has meant peanut butter and jelly sandwiches — “About a thousand of them,” Donald said — and chocolate milk before bed.
“I learned to love it, and I learned to hate it,” Donald said. “I still love chocolate milk, but the peanut butter and jelly I’m kind of getting tired of.”
Now literally bigger, if his status grows over the coming years as well, no one should be all that surprised.
UTC has a history of developing undersized players into quality offensive linemen, and there is no better example than Cole Strange. He arrived in Chattanooga as a 255-pound tight end in 2016 and left as a 300-pound lineman taken by the New England Patriots with the 29th overall pick of the 2022 NFL draft, making him UTC’s first player selected in the first round.
An even more recent example is Dave Monnot, who was 250 pounds when he arrived at UTC but was listed at 315 last season, his last with the program. Donald said Monnot showed him “the ropes of different techniques and different things, and how to prepare myself to put myself in position to be successful, because being a smaller guy, sometimes you don’t have leverage, but if your body’s in the right place and you do what you’re supposed to do, you’ll be successful.”
In terms of on-the-job training, it doesn’t get much more difficult than going up against perhaps the most talented team the Football Championship Subdivision’s Mocs have scheduled this season — Memphis, which not only competes in the Football Bowl Subdivision but is coming off back-to-back seasons with at least 10 wins and has aspirations of joining a power conference.
Donald and the rest of the lineup help up at times, and it’s experience that should prove valuable over their final 11 games of the regular season — all against FCS opponents, including eight straight against Southern Conference competition to close — and more if the program secures its second playoff appearance in three years.
Next up is Saturday’s game against Tennessee Tech (1-0) at 1 p.m. Eastern in Cookeville. The Golden Eagles, who are in their final year as an OVC-Big South Football Association program before joining the SoCon next summer, are ranked in both FCS national polls listed by the NCAA at No. 17 in the Stats Perform Top 25 and No. 20 in the coaches poll. UTC received votes in both polls.
“Aidan’s got a lot of fight in him, which is awesome,” Wright said. “I think that’s the one thing that’s a trait for him that’s really good, and he’s worked hard at being good. He didn’t really play that position (left tackle) in high school a bunch. They did a little bit, but he was playing tight end and playing tackle and defensive end.
“I’m sure he was frustrated at some point in time last year, not playing, but he didn’t really work himself into it enough. But just watching him, he’s got a really good understanding of what we’re trying to do offensively. He puts himself in good enough position technique-wise to get his job done, and he’s playing left tackle, which is a big deal, too. We trust him, or he wouldn’t be playing left tackle, and the biggest thing is just the fight he has to try and go win and go compete, and that has grown in him in the time he’s been here.”
And that’s a big part of the process. Like an undersized forward in basketball, Donald has figured out what he needs to do to be successful.
I’m a very technical player,” he said. “I understand that being undersized that things aren’t always going to go the way that I want them to, so my body position is the way I just prepare myself and just try to train myself to be in the right spots, it helps me out and ultimately leads to success.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com.