With another Super Bowl appearance, Cooper Kupp adds perfect chapter in twilight of his improbable story | Dave Boling
SAN JOSE, Calif. – Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald has an interesting term to describe receiver Cooper Kupp.
Force multiplier.
One definition: A leader who magnifies their impact by influencing not only what gets done, but how others lead, decide, and align.
It’s a value-added quality. Not rare, necessarily, but often not fully recognized by those who make roster decisions in the NFL, especially when based on the numerical (size, speed, age) rather than the less tangible.
Like many forces – gravitational, magnetic – this is invisible, but nonetheless powerful.
No debate, contributions on the field by the former All-Pro have diminished in recent seasons.
But his discipline and leadership are only more impactful in Seattle. He’s been the paradigm of selflessness and willingness to do everything on the field for the Seahawks.
Playing a position often populated by prima donnas, he’s a lunch-bucket Yakiman who continues to respect the game, even after it turned its back on him.
I spent much of the week at media events listening to him at a podium responding to an assault of questions ranging from insightful to absurd.
He answers quickly, in an arid voice and a slightly folksy demeanor, mixing faith and whimsy, and, often, becoming deeply philosophical.
The goal was to discover the roots of this force he creates within himself, and multiplies in others.
• • •
Mike Macdonald got him on the phone the second he could make legal contact.
Kupp was Super Bowl MVP with the Rams after a 2021 season when he led the NFL with 145 catches for 1,947 yards. When injuries caused his numbers to slip relative to the value of his contract, the Rams cut him.
“I said, ‘Look, we don’t get a lot of opportunities to acquire a player like you,’ ” Macdonald said of his phone call. “I used the term ‘force multiplier.’ He’s (been) that with the receiver room; with (Jaxon Smith-Njigba) … and that’s rippled all the way through our team.”
As he did with quarterback Matthew Stafford in Los Angeles, Kupp quickly forged a strong connection with Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold.
“(It’s) the mindset that he has, the way he leads by example,” Darnold said. “He’s one of those guys, when, if he does say things, the entire room is dead silent. And they’re super focused on what he’s saying. We know he doesn’t waste his breath; he’s always going to be able to say something very mindful. He’s had a huge impact on all of us.”
Darnold has seen it up close, as Kupp often attends quarterback meetings, in addition to those of receivers, so he can develop a fuller understanding of all elements in the passing game.
Smith-Njigba has credited Kupp’s mentoring often during this season, as he caught 119 passes (10 touchdowns) to earn the NFL’s Offensive Player of the Year Award.
“Process over results,” JSN often parrots, Kupp’s primary message to him. Do the right things every day, and success will follow.
Kupp knows how much leadership is part of his job this season. And he considers it a privilege.
“It’s really cool to be around people who are open to getting better,” Kupp said. “I’ve played a lot of football and to be around guys that are intrinsically motivated, that want to be better, who know there’s more out there for them … that’s special to be a part of.”
Typical of Kupp, he takes this part of his relationships to a greater depth, and recognizes it as a personal responsibility.
“You don’t take that lightly,” Kupp said. “To speak into someone’s life when they’re asking you to. There’s something about the weight of the responsibility you feel being able to model those things.”
It’s not enough to pass on the knowledge; Kupp must then, also, “live in that space – I’ve taken that very seriously.”
Speaking yourself into someone’s life: That’s not a phrase one hears often, but it’s definitely more personally compelling than just teaching someone how to run a pass route.
• • •
With his father and grandfather having played in the NFL, you might imagine Kupp was literally grandfathered into a pro football career.
Doesn’t seem as if Kupp ever saw it that way, though. He left Davis High in Yakima with only two scholarship offers, and spent four seasons at Eastern Washington before being drafted in the third round in 2017.
He looks back and says that he was slow in high school, and less than physically imposing.
But as a shrewd high schooler, he realized there was such a thing as being strategically slow.
A story has gone around about his meeting his wife, Anna, at a high school track meet.
When asked about it, Kupp said, yes, he had run an embarrassingly slow 100 meters (12.4 seconds), and finished last in his 200-meter heat. Not making it to the finals in the 200, he said, gave him time to go meet his future wife.
“Sometimes losing gets the job done,” he joked.
So, yes, losing is tolerable if there is a proportionally greater goal to be attained.
The way Kupp said it, as if a sarcastic verbal wink, sounded like the line after the fictional Cool Hand Luke bluffed his way to winning a poker pot with an empty hand. “Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand,” he said.
Kupp can attest.
Cool Hand Coop.
• • •
Some reporters seemed incredulous that a player from Eastern Washington University could become a Super Bowl MVP, First-team All-Pro, and claim a receiving triple crown statistical championship.
Hold on, Kupp said, EWU was not something to overcome, but to appreciate.
“It was one step along this path, this journey,” Kupp said. “I don’t think I was overcoming anything. It was my path to continue playing football in college; it gave me a chance to be in front of NFL people and make my dream a reality. Any opportunity to play football, I’m all in on.”
He cited the benefit of his many conversations with Aaron Best, line coach when he was there, and now the Eagles’ head coach, and also his receivers coach, Junior Adams, now with the Dallas Cowboys.
The lessons from Adams? “Beating somebody is not good enough,” Kupp said. “It’s how you do it so you can do it over and over and over. There’s detail in all of it, and there’s purpose in all of it, and there’s intent … setting up releases for later in the game.”
• • •
Kupp’s departure from the Rams last off-season is still being discussed in the press, and seems more like an insult as Kupp is now on the other side of this NFC West division rivalry.
“That was tough, no doubt about it, you spend so much time (eight years) together in one place, to have that taken away is difficult,” he said. “That just didn’t come to a close the way I pictured it.”
He started to expand, but paused. “There’s a piece of you that wants to …”
Wants to … what? Beat the tar out of them the next time you play? Wants to … wish them ill at every turn?
Kupp was above that, and turned it into a more positive expression of his identity.
“I don’t doubt who I am; I believed in myself regardless what’s happening outside my own beliefs. I wasn’t going to allow someone else to say who I was. My belief was I can play this game at a high level and I just needed the opportunity to do so. I took that approach and now I’m here.”
Through the week, Kupp has used the term “my journey” a number of times. It’s often when he’s pointing to low points or challenges, as every hero’s journey needs the ordeal to set up the reward.
“My journey to be here has had a lot of ups and downs,” Kupp said. “I’ve been by myself, in the weight room, by myself, all the doubts, hearing lies that are spoken over you and into your life. I had this belief that the things I was doing were for a greater purpose than for myself. I felt joy in playing this game. I felt I was made to do it.”
• • •
As Macdonald attested, Kupp had an immediate impact. Practically every Seahawk, at some point this season, has credited Kupp with having some influence on them.
That was never more so than in the NFC championship win over the Rams when Kupp caught a late touchdown pass and stretched out for a first-down catch on the game-clinching drive over the team that fired him.
“The script-writers got that one right,” Kupp kidded, voicing the joke that the NFL games are scripted entertainment.
Actually, that might have been too corny even for a Hollywood ending.
But, it’s still worth examining a hypothetical. Given how narrow the margin was in the NFC championship game (31-27), which determined that the Seahawks, not the Rams, would go to the Super Bowl, could we suggest that Kupp was the force that made the difference?
Had the Seahawks’ faith in Kupp been that tiny difference between the teams?
What he’s meant to the Seahawks has been stated repeatedly by teammates this week.
What he’s meant to the Rams was on display following that emotional and dramatic finish in the NFC title game, which sent the Rams home.
After the game, Puka Nacua, an immense receiving talent, who had been mentored by Kupp, came over for a sincere hug.
Cameras caught Nacua embracing Kupp. “Blessed to be around you,” Nacua said. “Go win it, man, you deserve it, Coop.”
Even at the cost of his own team failing to advance to the Super Bowl, Nacua said: “There wouldn’t be no other way … 100%.”
• • •
The typical hero’s journey involves a return home.
And maybe this is stretching, but Kupp’s getting cut by the Rams seemed like the world correcting a mistake made in 2017, when he was drafted by Los Angeles.
Drafting Kupp, and keeping him in Washington, would have made more sense to the Seahawks than taking center Ethan Pocic with the 58th pick. And Kupp undoubtedly would have been more productive than using their second-round pick on Malik McDowell, a defensive lineman who never played a down for them.
They had receivers Doug Baldwin, Tyler Lockett and Paul Richardson on the roster at the time, so it wasn’t an absolute need. Still, fun to think what an institution Kupp could have been with his whole career in Seattle.
When considering the precision of his routes, his granular study of the requirements of the position, his blend of discipline and artistry in his game, Kupp’s play is so reminiscent of Steve Largent’s.
Largent was the Founding Father of Seahawks receivership, and beloved by the community.
Kupp and Largent are united by another admirable quality: They shared a powerful sense that it’s anathema to waste even a single opportunity to catch a football thrown in their direction.
Kupp has one more game to lead this season’s team. It’s unlikely he’ll collect another Super Bowl MVP award, but not impossible.
Every Seahawk player – all those moved by the gravity of his message, and pulled in by the magnetism of his personality – would celebrate if the game followed that improbable script.