I will be interested to see where Cooper Kupp goes in the draft. His measurables aren’t great and he comes from a small school, but he’s caught a ton of balls.
Kupp at the combine measured at 6-foot-2 and 204 pounds, and he ran a 4.62. Especially the 40 time will scare some teams off – will he be able to get open against bigger, better NFL corners?
But Kupp appears to have a feel for getting open and catching the ball in traffic, which are harder to isolate on measured tests. He was a four-year starter at Eastern Washington, and he caught 428 passes and 73 touchdowns at that school. You need not teach him how to catch a ball.
That’s a less-heralded school, of course, but Eastern is large enough and good enough that it plays a game against a Pac-12 school each September (a chance for the bigger schools to get a preseason-type game, while Eastern picks up a paycheck). And Kupp exceeded expectations in all four of those games.
So did that entire team, in fact, winning at Oregon State and Washington State and scoring over 40 points in all four of those games. Kupp was playing against more NFL-type defensive backs on those Saturdays (in the Washington game, for example, he was working against Marcus Peters, who went on to be a first-round pick) yet Kupp caught 40 passes for 716 yards and 11 touchdowns in those games. That’s remarkable production, given that most players on those opponents are better than most players on the Eastern roster.
| KUPP VS. PAC-12 TEAMS | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | Opponent | No | Yards | Avg | TD |
| 2013 | at Ore. St. | 5 | 119 | 23.8 | 2 |
| 2014 | at Wash. | 8 | 145 | 18.1 | 3 |
| 2015 | at Oregon | 15 | 246 | 16.4 | 3 |
| 2016 | at Wash. St. | 12 | 206 | 17.2 | 3 |
With the iffy measurables, I expect Kupp will be selected in the second or third round. But there’s a good chance he’ll become a team’s third receiver almost immediately, and won’t surprise me at all if he goes on to have a better career than some of the wide receivers selected in the first round.
—Ian Allan