All the decision makers were there, bunkered inside a conference room at the Detroit Lions’ Allen Park training facility a few days before the 2014 draft.

General manager Martin Mayhew. Head coach Jim Caldwell. Even owner Martha Firestone Ford sat in a room as coaches and scouts ticked down a list of players the Lions could take with the 10th overall pick.

Eric Ebron had his supporters; assistant head coach Ron Prince gave an impassioned plea on the tight end’s behalf. Some in the room marveled at what Odell Beckham could do. And when the talk turned to Aaron Donald, the undersized Pitt defensive tackle had his advocates, too.

“I was starting to get cranked,” Jim Washburn, the Lions’ defensive line coach at the time, recalled in a phone interview with the Free Press. “And I said this guy is a Jedi. Everybody looked puzzled and Mrs. Ford was sitting there and she couldn’t figure out what the heck a Jedi was. And I said a Jedi, he’s like Yoda. It’s like a Jedi, they see things before they happen, and I said Aaron Donald sees things before they happen. And he’s John Randle. Maybe when it’s all said and done, he’s better than John Randle.”

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Washburn fell in love with Donald for obvious reasons, and early on in the process. I remember him gushing about the defensive tackle on a plane flight to Mobile, Ala., that January for the Senior Bowl.

Donald had 28.5 tackles for loss and 11 sacks in his senior season at Pitt and pulled what Washburn called “the trifecta of college football.”

Along with his ridiculous season, Donald dominated the Senior Bowl — “I’ve been there 20 times and there’s never been a performance like that, ever,” Washburn said — destroyed the NFL combine (where he ran a 4.68-second 40-yard dash) and for good measure followed that up with another eye-popping performance at his pro day.

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Washburn and fellow defensive line coach Kris Kocurek were smitten, but they ran into some resistance in the room.

“That’s one I’ll never forget,” Washburn said. “They had one guy there that said, ‘What in the world are we going to do with a little guy like that? I thought we were trying to get away from little guys.’ I said, ‘Well you make the exception to the exception,’ and then I went off and stood up and Kris Kocurek did, too. We went on and on about Aaron Donald.”

The Lions wanted big, long defensive tackles for Caldwell’s new defense, and Donald, at a shade under 6 feet tall, certainly did not fit the bill.

Washburn did not want to publicly identify who in the Lions’ personnel department torpedoed Donald as the potential pick.

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“I used to push guys. I’d cheat by making a highlight film, putting selective films together (for others to watch),” Washburn said. “And you didn’t have to (with Donald). … Go watch his game against Georgia Tech. They gave him these giant splits between the guards and center. It was a license to kill. It was unbelievable. Every time I watched film on him — Kris and I watched separate, we watched 12 games, 13 counting the Senior Bowl — and every time we watched him I would get up and say, ‘God dang, come in here Kris. ... Caldwell. Look at this.’ Just like unbelievable.”

Washburn’s infatuation with Donald was purely as a player — “The best defensive player (I’ve seen) in the 20 years I was in football,” Washburn said — but there were other practical reasons for the Lions to target Donald in the draft.

Starting defensive tackles Ndamukong Suh and Nick Fairley were entering the final year of their contracts in 2014, and while the Lions hoped to re-sign Suh, there was no guarantee the two sides would get a deal done.

A Suh-Donald-Fairley trio would have been torture on opposing offenses — the Lions, even without Donald, had one of the best defenses in the NFL that season — and Donald would have given the Lions insurance in case Suh left in free agency.

The Lions, of course, took Ebron with the 10th pick in the draft, Suh signed with the Miami Dolphins the following spring, and Donald went 13th overall to the then-St. Louis Rams, where he’s since developed into the single most dominant defensive player in football.

A three-time first-team All-Pro, Donald leads the NFL with 14.5 sacks, and on Sunday he and Suh, now teammates on a Rams team that has since moved to Los Angeles, will give Lions fans a glimpse of what might have been had the team made him and not Ebron the 10th pick of the 2014 draft.

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“It’s really unique to have two excellent (interior defensive linemen),” Lions offensive coordinator Jim Bob Cooter said. “They both play in multiple spots. Suh I’ve seen basically all over the line. And they have different strengths, which gives them some value. I’m sure they look at it as attacking the offense or attacking the offensive line. How Donald and Suh work together, maybe it’s a game, maybe it’s two one-on-ones, maybe it’s two different sides of the line. Sometimes you see one of those guys on a tight end. They got a lot of talent, they got a lot of really good players and they’re playing at a really high level, they’re getting after the quarterback, pressuring the quarterback and at the end of the day creating a lot of turnovers.”

Washburn said Kocurek, now the Dolphins’ defensive line coach, once asked if he’s still haunted by missing out on Donald.

The answer, Washburn said, is unequivocally yes.

In 2014, the only season Suh and Donald surely would have played together in Detroit, the Lions went 11-5 and lost in the first round of the playoffs. Washburn said he has no doubt the Lions beat the Dallas Cowboys in their wildcard game that year if Donald, the defensive rookie of the year that season, is in Detroit, and he believes the Lions would have "killed” the Green Bay Packers if they advanced to face them later in the playoffs.

“He’s the premier player in football in my opinion,” Washburn said. “You make the exception for the exception and the guy ... there shot him down.”

Contact Dave Birkett: dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett. Download our Lions Xtra app for free on Apple and Android!