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By Bob Sturm 13m ago
The NFL Draft is mere days away. The teams sitting out of this year’s first round certainly have had a hard time getting their respective communities fired up. When a franchise does not have a selection until No. 58 overall, most fans don’t even bother preparing a great deal.
But let’s not pretend they did not get something for their trouble. The Cowboys receive a player who has already demonstrated his extreme quality in a Dallas uniform. Amari Cooper has established himself as a premier NFL wide receiver and is just 24 years old. As I said a few times last year, Calvin Ridley was the 2018 wide receiver I had hoped the Cowboys would select after releasing Dez Bryant. They opted for Leighton Vander Esch instead, and it’s hard to question that decision. But what makes Cooper so special relative to Ridley is that they were both born in 1994, yet Cooper has already racked up over 4,000 receiving yards in his four NFL seasons. Ridley would be lucky to ever approach that number.
Since Cooper entered the league in 2015, here are the receivers in their twenties who have more yards than he does: DeAndre Hopkins, Mike Evans, Brandin Cooks, Jarvis Landry, Michael Thomas and Odell Beckham. None of them are south of their 25th birthday, of course, an event Cooper will celebrate this June. He isn’t the best in the league, but he could rise to that level during his next contract.
Cooper’s rookie deal includes one more season, during which he’d be paid $13.9 million. But both sides would like to tear that contract up and find the basis for a long-term deal. Of course, like DeMarcus Lawrence before him and Ezekiel Elliott and Dak Prescott after him, it would be foolish to expect a discount.
But, unlike all of those names, Cooper’s extension never felt like a matter of “if.” Once you trade a first-round pick to get a player, you are basically pledging that you plan on keeping him for the long term. This is so clear and obvious that often a new extension is announced almost simultaneously with the trade itself. You may recall that is exactly what happened after the Roy Williams trade in 2008. The Cowboys never made Williams play a single snap before announcing his new five-year, $45 million deal, one that showed the team’s commitment to finding Terrell Owens’ successor. This trade mirrored that one in so many ways, foremost among them the reality that Cooper was tabbed as the successor to Dez Bryant. The major difference: Cooper needed about one game to show he was no Roy Williams, even though so many fans and media were down on the trade after seeing the team get burned in 2008.
Cooper was a fantastic acquisition and an instant success. His 896 yards in a Cowboys uniform exceeded any NFL player’s production from the time of the trade until the end of the season except for T.Y Hilton and Michael Thomas. His seven touchdowns exceeded every player but Julio Jones. His 398 yards after the catch exceeded every receiver but Juju Smith-Schuster. He was dominant. And he did it all with a QB who we were told “wouldn’t know what to do with a No. 1 receiver, so why bother?” That proved to be complete and utter nonsense.
There was no shortage of nonsense, by the way, when the deal was done. Remember the narratives about whether he liked football and whether he could actually catch the ball?
Cooper was charged with three drops in Dallas on his 76 targets (3.9%) in a Cowboys uniform. He did fumble a few balls, but that will knock his grade down from A+ to a mere solid A.
All of that was accomplished without the benefit of time to get acquainted with his new team and by all accounts, an offensive coaching staff that was not the league’s best. Scott Linehan would be dismissed at the end of the season and the staff has been revamped for 2019 with promises of creativity and innovation. We shall see.
But the differences in the Dallas Cowboys offense were there for all to see. They were still flawed and clearly being coached to be conservative until the braintrust wanted to increase their risk when the situation was right, but look at some of these staggering post-trade improvements.
Cowboys Statistics 2018, before and after the trade for Amari Cooper