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Rams rookie Cooper Kupp proves he belongs as he strives for perfection
Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Cooper Kupp #18 runs into Seattle Seahawks defensive back Shaquill Griffin #26 as he is pushed out on the sideline after a 3rd quarter reception. The Los Angeles Rams were defeated by the Seattle Seahawks 16-10 in a regular season NFL game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Los Angeles,, CA 10/9/2017 (Photo by John McCoy, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
By Ryan Kartje | rkartje@scng.com | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: December 22, 2017 at 5:20 pm | UPDATED: December 22, 2017 at 6:08 pm
There’s a quote that has always stuck with Cooper Kupp, one he first heard from his father, Craig, who learned it years before as a quarterback at Pacific Lutheran University.
The original quote is attributed to Vince Lombardi. Over time, the coach’s words have been distilled down the way such adages often are, altered to fit motivational coffee mugs and company newsletters, but the message remains the same, and for most of Kupp’s life, he has held it close in everything he does. When all the odds seemed stacked against him, it was a lodestar, pushing him from Yakima, Washington to Los Angeles, from small-town high school football to the NFL.
Late last week, in front of his locker, Kupp recited it casually, unprompted.
“When you strive for perfection,” he said, “you’re bound to meet excellence along the way.”
The message sounds lifted from a cliche, motivational poster. But, then again, so does Kupp himself. His profile was made for the back of a Wheaties box: Humble and mild-mannered, hard-working and faith-driven, a small-town underdog who went from zero college offers to breaking Division-1 records for receptions, receiving yards, and receiving touchdowns, all the while willing himself forward through sheer work ethic and faith. It’s enough to make even Rudy feel inadequate.
His path to this point tiptoes the lines of too-good-to-be-true. And yet, here he is, anyway: the anonymous receiver recruit turned indispensable Rams rookie, living proof of Lombardi’s message.
“He’s the epitome of consistency in everything he’s done, right from the day he got here,” Rams offensive coordinator Matt LaFleur said.
Kupp is the first to admit his rookie season has not been perfect. But certainly, it has been nothing short of excellent. Through 14 games, the third-round pick has lapped the field of first-year NFL receivers. With two games remaining, he’s already set a Rams rookie record for receptions (58). With 120 more yards, Kupp will break another rookie receiving record, set by Eddie Kennison in 1996.
The standard he has set in 2017 is beyond what most rookies are capable, and those who know him best will tell you this is what he’s done all of his life. In the Kupp family, his grandfather says, that drive is genetic.
“There’s just this want to be the very best,” says Jake Kupp, who played 10 years as an offensive lineman with the Saints. “In some ways, it’s a rare gift. But in other ways, it can hurt you. Sometimes, we have trouble flushing away the mistakes.”
Kupp’s few miscues this season have been blips on the radar of those with reasonable expectations. But to the rookie himself, they’ve been agonizing. “I tend to take mistakes really hard,” he admits, and after a drop in the waning moments of the Rams first matchup with Seattle, that much was obvious. His face in the locker room was a ghostly shade of white. Months later, another drop and a goalline fumble in Minnesota left him morose, forcing him to confront the burden of his own self-expectation.
“There was some real soul-searching,” Craig says.
Kupp’s uncommon success is a product of this endless pursuit of perfection. And yet, as he deals with the inevitable growing pains of being an NFL rookie, it’s that very drive which, in his most challenging moments, threatened to weigh him down.
Back in front of his locker, he considers, again, the quote that has stuck with him all these years. He smiles.
“I tend to get caught up in striving for perfection,” Kupp admits, “and not so much the accepting excellence part.”
Acing the interview
Last February, in a small meeting room in Indianapolis, Kupp met with Sean McVay and his Rams staff for an interview. The 15 minutes spent in that room can make or break how a team feels about a prospect. The Rams were scheduled to meet with several other wideouts that week, many of whom tested better during the Combine, but in Kupp’s case, they needed only one question to be convinced.
They asked Kupp to draw up his favorite third-down play at Eastern Washington. That’s when the lesson began.
“He didn’t just draw up the play,” receivers coach Eric Yarber recalls. “He was able to draw up the play, tell us what the line did with their blocking scheme, tell us the job of all five eligibles, and go through the quarterback’s reads. No other receiver at the Combine could come even close to that.”
Coaches and scouts in the room looked at each other, stunned. To Yarber, it almost seemed as if Kupp was there to coach them.
“We were just like, “Oh my goodness. This kid is magnificent,’” Yarber says.
Even from an early age, his drive appeared extraordinary. As a toddler, his family marveled at how he could focus on a single task for hours. At 5 years old, his grandfather remembers watching in awe during a YMCA basketball game. Kupp’s team won, 41-2, and while other players lost interest, Kupp was locked in. “Cooper scored 39 of the 41 points,” Jake says, chuckling.
In junior high, when he was moved up to a better AAU basketball team, Kupp found himself riding the bench behind bigger, more developed players. He locked in again.
“He came home and worked — shooting, dribbling — every night until the sun went down,” Craig recalls.
When it came to football, though, that drive only seemed to take him so far. The two generations of Kupp men before him made it to the NFL. A future following in their footsteps became his dream. “I knew that’s what I was meant to do,” he says. But one look at him then suggested that was unlikely. As a freshman at Davis High, he weighed no more than 115 pounds.
Still, he was determined. He convinced himself to push harder, that any misstep might derail his mission.
“I was already behind,” Kupp says. “Any mistake I made, with my size, it felt like I had no chance.”
His father tried to sell college coaches on his passion, his work ethic, his football IQ, but it was no use. He was too small. Even as he grew to 170 pounds as a senior, colleges overlooked him. He left the field after his final high school game without a single scholarship offer — a feeling, Kupp says, he wouldn’t wish on anyone.
Beau Baldwin had been watching from afar, familiar with Kupp from summer football camps. When Idaho State swooped in with a late, full scholarship, the Eastern Washington coach did, too. It was a decision he’d look back on as one of the best of his tenure.
Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Cooper Kupp catches a pass against the Philadelphia Eagles during the first half of an NFL game Sunday, Dec. 10, 2017, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Kelvin Kuo)
Kupp redshirted as a freshman, but from there, the undersized wideout became a colossal presence wherever he went. He broke nearly every FCS receiving record, smashing Jerry Rice’s previously unmatched stats. When Eastern Washington played Pac-12 or Mountain West teams, coaches would often marvel to Baldwin after: How could they have overlooked this guy?
Kupp was determined to never let that happen again. He spent long nights in the Eastern Washington film room, learning every detail of the offense. When he got engaged and his soon-to-be wife, Anna, moved to campus, he would bring her along while he studied film. He rarely spent time elsewhere.
“Sometimes, we had to remind him to be more human,” Baldwin, now Cal’s offensive coordinator, says. “But he was just driven that way. He would say, ‘There’s just not enough time to do anything else.’ ”
It would all pay off on draft day. His family gathered in Newport Beach, where Kupp, perhaps prophetically, had rented a home to train for the Combine. He worried his 40 time (4.62) might be his latest obstacle in fulfilling a NFL dream. But his week of Senior Bowl practice had impressed scouts. All it took was one team to believe, and that belief, he reasoned, was most important.
Then, as the 69th picked rolled around, the Rams recalled that interview from February and the college tape that, to the team’s new 31-year-old coach, jumped off the screen. “Oh yeah,” McVay joked with his staff months earlier. “We’re going to get this guy.”
In Newport Beach, the phone rang. It was a local number.
The drop, and what followed
His ascent was swift. “It didn’t take him any time at all to learn our offense,” Yarber says. No one who knew him was surprised. Within weeks, it seemed, he was already one of the Rams’ most reliable offensive weapons, leading the team in receiving, surpassing even the wildest of expectations for a third-round receiver.
And so, when Cooper Kupp caught a pass over the middle in Minnesota, darting between two defenders near the goalline, it was almost jarring to see the ball slip from his grasp and tumble to the turf. The Vikings recovered. The Rams never did.
After the game, McVay brushed off the mistake, but Kupp shouldered the blame. It seemed to weigh heavy on him. “I’m a better player than what I showed out there,” he said in the locker room. When he arrived home, the frustration remained. Since high school, he’d conditioned himself that there was no room for error, and in a crucial moment, he’d made his worst yet. He couldn’t shake it.
“Things were happening that had never happened to him in his career,” Craig says.
Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Cooper Kupp signs autographs before an NFL game against the Philadelphia Eagles Sunday, Dec. 10, 2017, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
He knew he needed to confront this creeping sense of self-doubt, so that night, he reflected on all he’d done to get here — the years of hard work, the long nights in the film room, the relentless, unending pursuit to show that he belonged. Since his journey began, he’d put so much pressure on himself to be great, convinced that anything less would mean coming up short.
“It took a lot of faith along the way to believe that this was going to work out,” Kupp said, and as he considered then how to move forward, it was faith that he needed most. Faith in God. Faith in himself. Faith that, in spite of being undersized, in spite of a lack of recruiting buzz, in spite of his 40 time, he’d gotten this far for a reason.
Moving forward, past this brief brush with failure, would only make him stronger, Anna told him — stronger than perfection ever would.
“I needed to be brought back to what my purpose was,” Kupp said. “I needed to realize that I belonged here, that I could play free.”
Back at the facility, he felt teammates rally around him. Rodger Saffold, the Rams starting guard, pulled him off to the side. “These things happen,” he told him.
That week, his father could sense a weight was lifted off his shoulders. He seemed “free,” Craig says. The next Sunday, Kupp reeled in a career-high eight catches, his first game over 100 receiving yards.
After the game, Saffold approached the rookie wideout. He patted him on the back.
He never doubted that Kupp would bounce back. No one had.
The pride of Yakima
Last Sunday, the Kupp family sojourned west to Seattle to watch the Rams play the Seahawks. Two dozen family and friends — not counting the many others who made the two-hour drive from Yakima — sat high up in the CenturyLink Stadium stands, eager to see for themselves how far Cooper Kupp had come.
On a third down, in the first quarter, Jared Goff spotted Kupp alone in the middle of the field. He fired a pass in low. The ball slipped through Kupp’s fingers and fell to the turf.
There would be no dwelling on his mistake this time. A quarter later, Kupp flared out in the flat on playaction, and Goff found him. Running up the right sideline, he dodged a tackle from All-Pro Earl Thomas, spun out of another tackle, and pushed himself backwards toward the end zone.
From the stands, his personal cheering section roared. The play fell just short of the goal line. But those extra few feet — they hardly mattered. Kupp had willed himself further, like he always had, and for now, that pursuit was perfect enough.
https://www.ocregister.com/2017/12/...oves-he-belongs-as-he-strives-for-perfection/
Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Cooper Kupp #18 runs into Seattle Seahawks defensive back Shaquill Griffin #26 as he is pushed out on the sideline after a 3rd quarter reception. The Los Angeles Rams were defeated by the Seattle Seahawks 16-10 in a regular season NFL game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Los Angeles,, CA 10/9/2017 (Photo by John McCoy, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
By Ryan Kartje | rkartje@scng.com | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: December 22, 2017 at 5:20 pm | UPDATED: December 22, 2017 at 6:08 pm
There’s a quote that has always stuck with Cooper Kupp, one he first heard from his father, Craig, who learned it years before as a quarterback at Pacific Lutheran University.
The original quote is attributed to Vince Lombardi. Over time, the coach’s words have been distilled down the way such adages often are, altered to fit motivational coffee mugs and company newsletters, but the message remains the same, and for most of Kupp’s life, he has held it close in everything he does. When all the odds seemed stacked against him, it was a lodestar, pushing him from Yakima, Washington to Los Angeles, from small-town high school football to the NFL.
Late last week, in front of his locker, Kupp recited it casually, unprompted.
“When you strive for perfection,” he said, “you’re bound to meet excellence along the way.”
The message sounds lifted from a cliche, motivational poster. But, then again, so does Kupp himself. His profile was made for the back of a Wheaties box: Humble and mild-mannered, hard-working and faith-driven, a small-town underdog who went from zero college offers to breaking Division-1 records for receptions, receiving yards, and receiving touchdowns, all the while willing himself forward through sheer work ethic and faith. It’s enough to make even Rudy feel inadequate.
His path to this point tiptoes the lines of too-good-to-be-true. And yet, here he is, anyway: the anonymous receiver recruit turned indispensable Rams rookie, living proof of Lombardi’s message.
“He’s the epitome of consistency in everything he’s done, right from the day he got here,” Rams offensive coordinator Matt LaFleur said.
Kupp is the first to admit his rookie season has not been perfect. But certainly, it has been nothing short of excellent. Through 14 games, the third-round pick has lapped the field of first-year NFL receivers. With two games remaining, he’s already set a Rams rookie record for receptions (58). With 120 more yards, Kupp will break another rookie receiving record, set by Eddie Kennison in 1996.
The standard he has set in 2017 is beyond what most rookies are capable, and those who know him best will tell you this is what he’s done all of his life. In the Kupp family, his grandfather says, that drive is genetic.
“There’s just this want to be the very best,” says Jake Kupp, who played 10 years as an offensive lineman with the Saints. “In some ways, it’s a rare gift. But in other ways, it can hurt you. Sometimes, we have trouble flushing away the mistakes.”
Kupp’s few miscues this season have been blips on the radar of those with reasonable expectations. But to the rookie himself, they’ve been agonizing. “I tend to take mistakes really hard,” he admits, and after a drop in the waning moments of the Rams first matchup with Seattle, that much was obvious. His face in the locker room was a ghostly shade of white. Months later, another drop and a goalline fumble in Minnesota left him morose, forcing him to confront the burden of his own self-expectation.
“There was some real soul-searching,” Craig says.
Kupp’s uncommon success is a product of this endless pursuit of perfection. And yet, as he deals with the inevitable growing pains of being an NFL rookie, it’s that very drive which, in his most challenging moments, threatened to weigh him down.
Back in front of his locker, he considers, again, the quote that has stuck with him all these years. He smiles.
“I tend to get caught up in striving for perfection,” Kupp admits, “and not so much the accepting excellence part.”
Acing the interview
Last February, in a small meeting room in Indianapolis, Kupp met with Sean McVay and his Rams staff for an interview. The 15 minutes spent in that room can make or break how a team feels about a prospect. The Rams were scheduled to meet with several other wideouts that week, many of whom tested better during the Combine, but in Kupp’s case, they needed only one question to be convinced.
They asked Kupp to draw up his favorite third-down play at Eastern Washington. That’s when the lesson began.
“He didn’t just draw up the play,” receivers coach Eric Yarber recalls. “He was able to draw up the play, tell us what the line did with their blocking scheme, tell us the job of all five eligibles, and go through the quarterback’s reads. No other receiver at the Combine could come even close to that.”
Coaches and scouts in the room looked at each other, stunned. To Yarber, it almost seemed as if Kupp was there to coach them.
“We were just like, “Oh my goodness. This kid is magnificent,’” Yarber says.
Even from an early age, his drive appeared extraordinary. As a toddler, his family marveled at how he could focus on a single task for hours. At 5 years old, his grandfather remembers watching in awe during a YMCA basketball game. Kupp’s team won, 41-2, and while other players lost interest, Kupp was locked in. “Cooper scored 39 of the 41 points,” Jake says, chuckling.
In junior high, when he was moved up to a better AAU basketball team, Kupp found himself riding the bench behind bigger, more developed players. He locked in again.
“He came home and worked — shooting, dribbling — every night until the sun went down,” Craig recalls.
When it came to football, though, that drive only seemed to take him so far. The two generations of Kupp men before him made it to the NFL. A future following in their footsteps became his dream. “I knew that’s what I was meant to do,” he says. But one look at him then suggested that was unlikely. As a freshman at Davis High, he weighed no more than 115 pounds.
Still, he was determined. He convinced himself to push harder, that any misstep might derail his mission.
“I was already behind,” Kupp says. “Any mistake I made, with my size, it felt like I had no chance.”
His father tried to sell college coaches on his passion, his work ethic, his football IQ, but it was no use. He was too small. Even as he grew to 170 pounds as a senior, colleges overlooked him. He left the field after his final high school game without a single scholarship offer — a feeling, Kupp says, he wouldn’t wish on anyone.
Beau Baldwin had been watching from afar, familiar with Kupp from summer football camps. When Idaho State swooped in with a late, full scholarship, the Eastern Washington coach did, too. It was a decision he’d look back on as one of the best of his tenure.
Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Cooper Kupp catches a pass against the Philadelphia Eagles during the first half of an NFL game Sunday, Dec. 10, 2017, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Kelvin Kuo)
Kupp redshirted as a freshman, but from there, the undersized wideout became a colossal presence wherever he went. He broke nearly every FCS receiving record, smashing Jerry Rice’s previously unmatched stats. When Eastern Washington played Pac-12 or Mountain West teams, coaches would often marvel to Baldwin after: How could they have overlooked this guy?
Kupp was determined to never let that happen again. He spent long nights in the Eastern Washington film room, learning every detail of the offense. When he got engaged and his soon-to-be wife, Anna, moved to campus, he would bring her along while he studied film. He rarely spent time elsewhere.
“Sometimes, we had to remind him to be more human,” Baldwin, now Cal’s offensive coordinator, says. “But he was just driven that way. He would say, ‘There’s just not enough time to do anything else.’ ”
It would all pay off on draft day. His family gathered in Newport Beach, where Kupp, perhaps prophetically, had rented a home to train for the Combine. He worried his 40 time (4.62) might be his latest obstacle in fulfilling a NFL dream. But his week of Senior Bowl practice had impressed scouts. All it took was one team to believe, and that belief, he reasoned, was most important.
Then, as the 69th picked rolled around, the Rams recalled that interview from February and the college tape that, to the team’s new 31-year-old coach, jumped off the screen. “Oh yeah,” McVay joked with his staff months earlier. “We’re going to get this guy.”
In Newport Beach, the phone rang. It was a local number.
The drop, and what followed
His ascent was swift. “It didn’t take him any time at all to learn our offense,” Yarber says. No one who knew him was surprised. Within weeks, it seemed, he was already one of the Rams’ most reliable offensive weapons, leading the team in receiving, surpassing even the wildest of expectations for a third-round receiver.
And so, when Cooper Kupp caught a pass over the middle in Minnesota, darting between two defenders near the goalline, it was almost jarring to see the ball slip from his grasp and tumble to the turf. The Vikings recovered. The Rams never did.
After the game, McVay brushed off the mistake, but Kupp shouldered the blame. It seemed to weigh heavy on him. “I’m a better player than what I showed out there,” he said in the locker room. When he arrived home, the frustration remained. Since high school, he’d conditioned himself that there was no room for error, and in a crucial moment, he’d made his worst yet. He couldn’t shake it.
“Things were happening that had never happened to him in his career,” Craig says.
Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Cooper Kupp signs autographs before an NFL game against the Philadelphia Eagles Sunday, Dec. 10, 2017, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
He knew he needed to confront this creeping sense of self-doubt, so that night, he reflected on all he’d done to get here — the years of hard work, the long nights in the film room, the relentless, unending pursuit to show that he belonged. Since his journey began, he’d put so much pressure on himself to be great, convinced that anything less would mean coming up short.
“It took a lot of faith along the way to believe that this was going to work out,” Kupp said, and as he considered then how to move forward, it was faith that he needed most. Faith in God. Faith in himself. Faith that, in spite of being undersized, in spite of a lack of recruiting buzz, in spite of his 40 time, he’d gotten this far for a reason.
Moving forward, past this brief brush with failure, would only make him stronger, Anna told him — stronger than perfection ever would.
“I needed to be brought back to what my purpose was,” Kupp said. “I needed to realize that I belonged here, that I could play free.”
Back at the facility, he felt teammates rally around him. Rodger Saffold, the Rams starting guard, pulled him off to the side. “These things happen,” he told him.
That week, his father could sense a weight was lifted off his shoulders. He seemed “free,” Craig says. The next Sunday, Kupp reeled in a career-high eight catches, his first game over 100 receiving yards.
After the game, Saffold approached the rookie wideout. He patted him on the back.
He never doubted that Kupp would bounce back. No one had.
The pride of Yakima
Last Sunday, the Kupp family sojourned west to Seattle to watch the Rams play the Seahawks. Two dozen family and friends — not counting the many others who made the two-hour drive from Yakima — sat high up in the CenturyLink Stadium stands, eager to see for themselves how far Cooper Kupp had come.
On a third down, in the first quarter, Jared Goff spotted Kupp alone in the middle of the field. He fired a pass in low. The ball slipped through Kupp’s fingers and fell to the turf.
There would be no dwelling on his mistake this time. A quarter later, Kupp flared out in the flat on playaction, and Goff found him. Running up the right sideline, he dodged a tackle from All-Pro Earl Thomas, spun out of another tackle, and pushed himself backwards toward the end zone.
From the stands, his personal cheering section roared. The play fell just short of the goal line. But those extra few feet — they hardly mattered. Kupp had willed himself further, like he always had, and for now, that pursuit was perfect enough.
https://www.ocregister.com/2017/12/...oves-he-belongs-as-he-strives-for-perfection/
