Cooper Kupp: Must Watch and Much Respect

Picture courtesy Big Sky Conference

Cooper Kupp just finished up his last regular season game against our two Montana schools and, as usual, he put on another show. Four years of watching Kupp tear up the Cats’ and Griz’s defense is finally over but at the end of it all you almost don’t want a unique talent like this leaving the Big Sky Conference. As a fan of football, he was that much fun to watch even when he was carving up your team’s defense.

During Kupp’s freshman year, in 2013, I remember watching him play in Cheney against Montana State. He didn’t have the best day for an Eastern Washington wide receiver, (current senior Shaq Hill had 172 yards receiving and 3 touchdowns) but he did catch everything that came his way en route to an 8 reception, 110 yards receiving, and 1 touchdown Saturday. Two weeks before the MSU game he dominated the Grizzly secondary for 11 catches, 182 yards, and 2 touchdowns. It wasn’t so much his stat line that day that impressed, it was the catches he made and how effortless some of the tougher catches looked. Watching Kupp that day, I couldn’t help but think that this kid was going to be good. Looking back now, good is an understatement.

(Quickly off the Kupp subject: The only other receiver I could remember watching in person that impressed me as much as Kupp was when the then non-Big Sky Conference Northern Colorado Bears came to Bozeman my freshman year with their massive future NFL receiver Vincent Jackson. Jackson was on another level and had 8 catches for 183 yards and a touchdown that day.)

Kupp has dominated the Big Sky in his 3 and a half years with the Eagles. How did he fare against our Montana teams? In his four games against the Bobcats, Kupp had 42 receptions, 617 yards, and 7 touchdowns. Yeah, that’s in four damn games. But it wasn’t just the Cats that he torched. In his 4 regular season games against the Grizzlies, Kupp had 33 receptions for 574 yards and 6 touchdowns. All in all, the state of Montana saw Kupp score on them 13 times in his four years. No one could stop him. Coordinators knew all about him and he still went off each week.

The Big Sky Conference wasn’t the only conference that Kupp was unreal against. Cooper Kupp owns the Pac12 conference. Owns them! Check out his career against one of the premier conferences in all of college football:

· 2013 against Oregon State: 5 receptions, 119 yards, and 2 touchdowns

· 2014 against Washington: 8 receptions, 145 yards, and 3 touchdowns

· 2015 against Oregon: 15 receptions, 246 yards, and 3 touchdowns

· 2016 against Washington State: 12 receptions, 206 yards, and 3 touchdowns

The dude averaged 10 catches, 170 yards, and almost 3 touchdowns per game in his career against the Pac12. Every single time I look at those stats it makes me shake my head. NFL scouts says he lacks breakaway speed, doesn’t have the athleticism to create space, and lets the ball into his body at times. Tell that to those Pac12 defensive backs.

So far in his career, Kupp has played in 46 games with the Eagles and in well over half of those games he has gone over 100 yards. He has a career total of 67 touchdowns, has already set the FCS record for touchdown receptions in a career, and he also has three regular season games and the playoffs to come. He’s on another level.

In each sport, there is a player that plays for a rival team that you can’t help but just respect because of the way they played and their skill level (I’m thinking of Derek Jeter in baseball, Peyton Manning in football, and Kobe Bryant in basketball) and when they walk away from the game, or head to the next level, you tip your cap and remember how fun they were to watch. Cooper Kupp is that guy for me and a lot of other Big Sky football fans.

He is a team first guy that let his play do the talking. He was loyal to the school that gave him a shot when he could have gone the route of Vernon Adams and grad transferred or bolted to the NFL after his junior year (as a Cat fan I appreciate not grad transferring for obvious reasons). Hell yeah, it sucked when he lit up your defense and the scoreboard, but you always wanted to see him play. You always wanted to check your ESPN app to see what he did when he wasn’t playing the Cats or Griz that week. He’ll be a guy that I’ll check how he does each Sunday after this season ends.

It’s hard to believe Kupp’s only two FCS options coming out of high school was Idaho State and Eastern Washington. It was fun, and continues to be fun, to watch Cooper Kupp. He was a must watch player who deserves everyone’s respect regardless of team loyalties.

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