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Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Cooper Kupp sees Sam Darnold on Seahawks like Matthew Stafford on '21 Rams. That went OK
Cooper Kupp was emerging as a star. It was March of 2021. Born and raised in Yakima, a national-award winner at Eastern Washington, the previously overlooked wide receiver was coming off 94- and 92-catch seasons with the Los Angeles Rams. He'd earned a $47 million contract extension with L.A. Then he met Matthew Stafford. That spring the Rams struck a massive trade with the Lions to get Detroit's franchise quarterback. At the time, Stafford had never played with Kupp. They met that April, when the Rams began their offseason training program then organized team activities (OTAs) on the practice field. Within months, Kupp, Stafford and the Rams exploded. Kupp had been playing 80% of L.A.'s snaps the previous two seasons, when the Rams played more '12' personnel with one back and two tight ends. In 2021, he almost never came off the field. He played 94% of snaps with Stafford that year. He and Stafford dominated the NFL with league bests of 145 completions for 1,947 yards and 16 touchdowns. Stafford threw to Kupp a whopping 191 times in 17 regular-season games. They stormed into Super Bowl 56. In that game, the two of them were unstoppable again, beating Cincinnati to win the Lombardi Trophy. They connected for two touchdown passes, including the winning one with 85 seconds remaining. Kupp earned the Super Bowl 56 MVP and NFL offensive player of the year awards, plus his first Pro Bowl selection for that wondrous 2021 season. Despite no connection before, he and Stafford played in 2021 as if they knew what each other was thinking. They were in step on the timing of routes, and on throws. They were precisely synchronized on reading coverages and blitzes. Kupp ran to the exact spot on the field at the exact time when the defense was most vulnerable, for seemingly any pass from Stafford. It was art. It transformed the Rams. They went from a middling wild-card team the previous season, out of the playoffs two years before, to Super Bowl champions. So just how long did it take for Kupp to develop his almost supernatural rapport with Stafford? 'It was very fast. Honestly, it was very fast,' Kupp said Tuesday. He was speaking a couple hours after he signed his three-year, $45 million contract to be the Seahawks' new wide receiver for his home-state team. 'And I think part of that, one, was Matthew played when he was in Detroit, I think he had, like, five offensive coordinators in his time there,' Kupp said. Stafford indeed had five different play callers in his eight seasons with the Lions to begin his career: Scott Linehan, Joe Lombardi, Jim Bob Cooter and, lastly former Seahawks Super Bowl OC Darrell Bevell in 2019 and '20. 'So he had seen all these different ways of running an offense,' Kupp said. On the 2021 Rams, Stafford and Kupp had offensive wunderkind Sean McVay as their play designer and caller. 'Then coming into OTAs, I don't know, it just clicked,' Kupp said. 'It just clicked.' Well, there was a bit more to it than that. Four years later, Kupp is in another new situation. He is meeting another new quarterback. In Seattle. Four days before the Seahawks agreed to the deal with Kupp last week, they reached an agreement with Sam Darnold on a three-year contract. It has a maximum value of $100.5 million. He will replace Geno Smith as the team's franchise quarterback. The Seahawks traded Smith three days before the Darnold deal, to the Las Vegas Raiders. Kupp sees Darnold coming to the Seahawks as similar to Stafford coming to Kupp's Rams four years ago. The Seahawks' new offensive coordinator for 2025 is Klint Kubiak. He will be the eighth play caller Darnold has had in eight NFL seasons, for five teams. Darnold turns 28 in June. He was the third pick in the 2018 draft out of USC by the New York Jets. He had Jeremy Bates (another former Seahawks OC) and head coach Adam Gase as his play callers in New York. With Carolina in 2021 he had Joe Brady, until Brady got fired during that season. Then it was Jeff Nixon. In 2022 with the Panthers, Darnold had Ben McAdoo as OC. In 2023, Darnold was the backup to Brock Purdy on San Francisco's Super Bowl team. Head coach Kyle Shanahan called the plays. Kubiak was the 49ers' passing-game coordinator with Purdy and Darnold that season. For 2024, Darnold signed a one-year, $10 million contract with Minnesota. It appeared he was going to back up J.J. McCarthy. But a knee injury in August ended the rookie season for the Vikings' 10th pick in last year's draft. Darnold then flourished with Vikings head coach Kevin O'Connell calling his plays. He threw for 4,319 yards with 35 touchdowns against just 10 interceptions. He and Minnesota went 14-3 before losing to Kupp, Stafford and the Rams in the first round of the playoffs in January. With McCarthy healthy and ready to start this season, the Vikings let Darnold go into free agency last week — and to Seattle with Kupp. Great for Darnold, and the Seahawks, that Kupp relates to quarterbacks better than most wide receivers. Since coach Jay Dumas broke Kupp's dream of moving a USC running back and moved the tiny sophomore to wide receiver in his 10th-grade season at Davis High School in Yakima, Kupp has played wide receiver with a quarterback's mind. His father Craig Kupp set NAIA Division-II records as a quarterback for Pacific Lutheran University. He's in the PLU athletics Hall of Fame. (So is his wife; Cooper's mom Karin was a soccer All-American for the Lutes in the late 1980s). Craig Kupp went from PLU into the NFL as a backup quarterback with the Phoenix Cardinals, then behind Troy Aikman with the Dallas Cowboys. Cooper Kupp thinks that's a big reason he meshed so well with Stafford, and why he'll get in sync right away with Darnold. 'I think a big part of that (is) my dad played quarterback, and so I learned receiver from a quarterback,' Cooper said. 'I was running routes for my dad and he'd tell me from his perspective if I did something wrong. It might not be what the receiver coach would say, but the quarterback was telling me what I did wrong. 'I think that helped set things up to where I feel like I can understand what a quarterback is seeing and how he's feeling based on the coverage and where the openings might be, and I think I play a role in that and trying to make sure that I can be able to find those soft spots for him.' Kupp's process with Darnold will begin next month. They will start Kubiak's and coach Mike Macdonald's offseason training program for the remade Seahawks offense. Kubiak's outside-zone running and blocking scheme with quarterbacks under center for direct snaps, motion with receivers before the snap and play-action passes with the quarterback rolling out is similar to what Darnold ran with Minnesota last season. That's another reason Macdonald and general manager John Schneider immediately pivoted to Darnold once they saw Smith wanted $5-10 million more annually in a contract extension from the Seahawks beyond 2025. 'I'm looking forward to Sam,' Kupp said. 'He's going to be in a similar spot (as Stafford in 2021), where he's played in a lot of different offenses now. 'And in some ways, while he doesn't probably feel like that was the best thing for him, when he gets into the right system — which is real similar to what he did last year — that can be a very big positive for a quarterback.' The question with Kupp is whether he can be what he wasn't his last three season with the Rams since his 2021 breakout: Healthy. He's missed 17 games the last three years. He turns 32 in June. That's why L.A. released him last week. The question with Kupp is not how he will be thinking and linking with Darnold from day one, and how hard he will work to make their partnership immediately successful. Like his with Stafford four years ago. 'He's my son and I'm going to be biased,' Craig Kupp told The News Tribune in 2021, 'but he's a pretty special talent. 'The way he thinks, his philosophy, he wants to get better every day. He sets a goal and works to get better every day. 'He's been that way since high school. And he just keeps doing it. There's been so many people that say he doesn't have the athletic ability, for whatever reason. And he keeps doing it. 'He's a special breed.'
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Seahawks Cooper Kupp has emulated since growing up in Yakima. And why he's here
As he walked the long hallway from his new locker room to the team meeting room, Cooper Kupp passed hundreds of framed photos. They were from all the Seahawks' victories back to the team's expansion season. That was 1976. Seventeen years before Kupp was born, in Yakima. Wearing a thick flannel over a vintage Pearl Jam T-shirt — yeah, he's definitely from here — Kupp zeroed in on the photos of Doug Baldwin playing in Seattle's mid-2010s Super Bowl seasons. Kupp, the All-Pro wide receiver Super Bowl 56 MVP with his now-former Los Angeles Rams, was a senior at Davis High School in Yakima during Baldwin's 2011 rookie season with the Seahawks. Kupp watched Seahawks games on local television every football weekend growing up in Yakima. He did the same in Cheney, while he was an overlooked wide receiver at Eastern Washington University. He broke Eags' records and become the Walter Payton Award winner for the nation's best college player at the Football Championship Subdivision. 'I was walking through the halls back here, it's like, looking at these photos of iconic (plays), just moments in games, and being able to recognize 'Man, I remember where I was when that happened,'' Kupp, who turns 32 in June, said Tuesday inside the Seahawks' Virginia Mason Athletic Center. 'We were just talking down the hall, Doug Baldwin, one of the best counterbalance releases in history. It's like little pieces of a game like that. Like, 'Man, that's something that I do!' It's watching Doug Baldwin do that stuff to guys, turn people around all the time. 'So that's part of what is in my bag. It's something that I carry with me. There's guys that have come through this organization that have been impactful in ways they might not know about how I play the game.' Kupp signed his three-year, free-agent contract earlier Tuesday. The Rams, the only NFL team he's played for until now, last week released their 2021 NFL offensive player of the year. That was when the former ninth-grader at Davis in Yakima who wanted to be a USC running back dominated the NFL with a league-leading 145 receptions, league-best 1,947 yards and NFL-topping 16 touchdowns. Kupp agreed to his contract with his home-state team five days after the Seahawks traded two-time Pro Bowl wide receiver DK Metcalf to Pittsburgh. Kupp's deal is worth a maximum of $45 million, an average maximum value of $15 million per year through the 2027 season with Seattle. 'Full-circle moment, coming back, being able to throw on a Seattle Seahawks jersey. That's a really cool thing,' he said. 'That's something that I don't take lightly. 'Just really excited to be able to be a part of this program, what this program has been about, and continue to move it forward.' Speaking a few feet in front of his wife Anna — they met when he was on the Davis High track team and she was competing for Richland High School — Kupp said he didn't get a reason from the Rams why they released him. 'Not a ton of clarity in that regard,' Kupp said. 'It's been difficult. In all honesty, it's been very difficult and frustrating, and there's been lots of questions. It's a real tough situation. I've said, I've always imagined that I'd finish my career there. But that's not what the plan was that God had for me and my family. 'Stepping into this new adventure, this new place, this new chapter in my career but also in our lives as my wife and I navigate moving back up home, back up to our home state, I think that's something that we're excited about facing. We're excited about the community that we get to be a part of, the people that are going to be a part of our lives. 'But yeah, it has been difficult. Without a doubt, it has been difficult. And we're humans. We're real people. ' Injuries on top of cost was why L.A. released him. He's missed 17 games the last three seasons since he signed a three-year, $80 million extension with the Rams following his breakout 2021. The Rams see him as turning 32, expensive and recently hurt. Many see Kupp as fading. But in this era where athletes seek every opportunity to put a chip of their shoulders for (often-manufactured) motivation, Kupp wants none of that. 'I've had people doubt me for a long time through my life,' he said. 'In some ways, rightfully so. I was a very small kid growing up and cared a lot, but there's a lot of people that care a lot and just don't have the stuff to string together. 'But with all those doubts and all those things, it's never been about proving other people wrong. I think I've lived in that space, and it never goes well. It's been about being who I am, like, believing in myself and knowing that I can be who I see myself becoming. When I've taken that attitude, when I've taken that mindset, that's always when I've been at my best. And I'll continue that.' Kupp said after eight NFL seasons, 'I know how to navigate these waters. I've been here before. 'And it's not about the negative energy,' he said. 'It's not about proving anyone else wrong, trying to make anyone else feel bad about anything. 'It's just about being myself and being who I believe I can be and going out there and playing the game I love.' Kupp thanked his Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald, offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak, general manager John Schneider plus his former Rams teammate Ernest Jones and Seattle wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba. They all gave him the same, enthusiastic endorsement about the Seahawks as he was deciding where to sign as a free agent. 'I thought that the messaging from Mike and from John, from 'Kubes', from all the guys I talked to here, the messaging was right on par with what I thought was how you build a championship team. It's about the people,' Kupp said. 'You focus on bringing good people that are about ball, and all the other stuff is going to fall in place. 'That's something that I was like, 'Man, this is something that I know that that's how you build a good team.' I know the best teams I've been a part of have been built that way. 'So that excited me.' So did what he called the 'belief' that he feels from Seahawks leaders. He sees that as stemming from the Seahawks' success of the last dozen years, including consecutive Super Bowls at the end of the 2013 and '14 seasons. Kupp said doesn't see these Seahawks, coming off a 10-7 season in 2024 despite not making the playoffs for the second consecutive year, as that far from contending for the Super Bowl. He'll be playing with, and mentoring, Smith-Njigba, with Tyler Lockett and traded DK Metcalf no longer in Seattle. Smith-Njigba, the team's first-round draft choice in 2023, tied the recently released Lockett's Seahawks record with 100 receptions this past season. Smith-Njigba primarily played the slot receiver, lining up inside in three- and four wide-receiver formations in 2024. In the slot is where Kupp became an All-Pro, a Super Bowl MVP and an $80 million man. But the newest Seahawks sees no duplication in his and Smith-Njigba's games with Seattle's new quarterback Sam Darnold throwing to them in 2025. 'In eight years with the Rams, I think I was tagged with 'the slot.' But I don't know how you determine that when we're in condensed formations, I'm outside but I'm running a slot route,' Kupp said. 'A lot of times I was outside, and I'm not sure if it was being tagged as a slot route or not. 'But the ability to move in an offense and the ability in this offense and what Kubiak has done is being able to formation guys to be anywhere. That's how I had learned this offense originally was, that you've got to learn the whole thing because you could be in any one of these spots at any time. 'I think Jaxon did some of that same stuff last year where he played inside and outside and being able to run routes that are typically for an 'X' (split end on the line) or an 'F' (a receiver who runs double moves and deep routes) or a 'Z' (flanker off the line), being able to run all that stuff. I think that's what we've got. 'We've got guys that are going to be willing to learn the offense as a whole there and be able to take advantage of those opportunities.' He'll do that with the team he grew up watching. Including in person. He attended a Seahawks game watching from the upper deck of Lumen Field 19 years ago, when he was 13. 'A snow game against the Packers, 2006,' Kupp said of Nov. 27, 2006, a Monday night in Seattle. 'I was up in the very top, frozen as an icicle up there. But it was incredible watching. (Shaun) Alexander went off. It was a crazy. 'I feel like I got to miss school the next day, so it was like bonus points because I didn't have to go to school the next day. 'But yeah, memories. I have memories of being there, being part of that environment, and it's such a cool thing. That was a special thing growing up, to be able to go to a Seahawks game. A very special memory.'
