ALAMEDA — When Amari Cooper got to Alabama in 2012, it wasn’t hard for him to find a player to look up to.

Julio Jones had recently completed a spectacular career for the Crimson Tide and was the No. 6 overall pick a year before to the Atlanta Falcons and he spent a lot of time coming back to campus.

“When I got to Alabama, he was like the guy,” Cooper said Wednesday of Jones. “I looked at a lot of his film, I studied a lot of his film and I was like, ‘I want to do some of the things that he did.’”

There was one problem. Cooper was 6-foot-1 and about 185 pounds then. Jones was a physical specimen at 6-3, 220.

“When I got to Alabama, I was really small,” Cooper said. “He was always really big. There was some stuff that he did that I couldn’t do that I wanted to do so I would get in the weight room and lift weights to try to get bigger because he was kind of pushing guys around.”

Cooper is up to a listed 210 pounds and blossoming into one of the better receivers in the league — a title already owned by Jones, a three-time Pro Bowler and the NFL’s leader with 1,871 receiving yards last year.

“He can stick his foot in the ground and change direction like a small guy for being a bigger guy,” Falcons coach Dan Quinn said on a conference call of Cooper. “When a big guy can change direction, that’s a dangerous dude.

“Often times you may see big guys that can go fly, they can take the top off, but when you have the ability to stick your foot in the ground and change directions along with that big catching radius, that to me is where a guy can really become dangerous. We’ve got our hands full for sure.”

Atlanta cornerback Desmond Trufant didn’t want to make any comparisons, but it also impressed with Cooper.

“I think he’s making his own name,” Trufant said. “He’s fast. He’s quick. He plays the ball well. He’s competitive. So, I’m looking forward to the challenge. It’s going to be a fight.”