Tollner knew Kupp would be good, but not this good
Sometimes, older eyes are wiser eyes.
A retired football coach and San Diegan named Ted Tollner had been immersed in football for some four decades when he returned to the sport several years ago to prepare a handful of players for the NFL Draft.
The workouts weren’t a lot to go on. Passing drills, mostly. But, five years ago, one player stuck with Tollner. A receiver. He was from Eastern Washington, infusing a trace of surprise in Tollner’s voice.
“This guy’s going to be a good player,” Tollner said as the 2017 draft drew close. He added: “He just loves to work and he has great ability, hands and body control, and it’s going to be interesting to see what happens for him.”
The hungry, quick athlete was Cooper Kupp.
Tollner, a former college quarterback, spent 16 years in the NFL as an offensive assistant. He was USC’s head coach another four years and led San Diego State for eight seasons as part of a 31-year coaching career.
Kupp managed to reach across those decades and hold Tollner’s attention.
“The thing that stood out was his attitude about work,” Tollner said this week. “He absolutely loved it. He’d want to keep going. I’d say, ‘No — (laughter) that’s enough for the day.’
“He just loved doing all the things that make you good.”
Tollner had a coaching friend at Eastern Washington, where Kupp had broken 15 national records in his 52-game career. Tollner’s son, Bruce, was an attorney with the agency (Rep 1 Sports) that was set to represent Kupp in the NFL.
But Tollner didn’t foresee Kupp setting the NFL on fire.
“I’m surprised only in that he’s accomplished a unique amount of positive things in a short time in his career,” Tollner said Tuesday, two days after Kupp, 28, earned Super Bowl 56 MVP honors on the heels of a dominant playoff run and a 2021 regular season in which he won the NFL’s receiving triple crown.
“You can’t guess those kind of things,” he said. “I thought he’d be a player in the league and a good player — but not what he is right now. You don’t know that he’s gonna have that great feel for coverage, because that’s not what we did (in
the workouts).”
Kupp was 6-foot-1½ and 203 pounds. He profiled as a large slot receiver who’d attack the middle of the field. Because he clocked at 4.60 seconds in the 40-yard dash (and had played at a level below the major college powerhouses) he had no shot of going in the draft’s first round. He went to Rams in the third round, the seventh receiver chosen.
“The thing that caught me was his concentration on catching the ball, and he had great body control when he was running routes,” said Tollner, who served two years under Rams coach Chuck Knox in the early 1990s. “You could see the quickness at the top of the route as he was trying to set up the defender. He was quick in and out of his breaks. He was unbelievably humble.”
Three years ago Kupp’s absence from Super Bowl 53 because of a knee injury that ended his second NFL season coincided with the Rams scoring no touchdowns in a 13-3 loss to New England.
An alarming development for the Rams on Sunday evening was that in the middle stretch of Super Bowl 56, their coaches and perhaps quarterback Matthew Stafford seemed not to try hard enough to get Kupp the football.
Kupp helped build a 13-3 lead against Cincinnati by evading two tacklers on third down (setting up Odell Beckham Jr.’s nifty touchdown catch) and grabbing a touchdown pass from Matthew Stafford after his fake run block fooled a defender.
The Rams — who lost Beckham to a knee injury late in the first half — mostly sputtered until deep into the fourth quarter when, trailing 20-16, they turned to Kupp.
The result was a 79-yard drive that stood as the game-winner.
“What he and the quarterback did: that was a sensational drive,” said Tollner, who looked on from Oakland, where the next night he attended a ceremony honoring John Madden. “Other people made it happen because they have to. But the focal point was who threw it and who caught it.”
Kupp nailed many details on the drive that led to his four receptions and his jet-sweep run — a clever call by coach Sean McVay — that kept the Rams alive on fourth-and-1.
His presnap motions and shifts, his reads of the pass coverages and his precisely timed routes will make the film study a feast for football nerds. They’ll dissect how Kupp beat a different linebacker on two catches, how he found a zone void that Stafford masterfully created and threw to with a no-look pass for the ages and, finally, how he created the touchdown off a 1-yard fade route against corner Eli Apple. Tollner ate it up. “When everything was on the line to win a Super Bowl, he did his part,” Tollner said. “And he did in a beautiful way.”
Eastern Washington, it turned out, was plenty good enough. And the 4.6 speed was fast enough. And Rams scouts headed by General Manager Les Snead were onto something big five years ago. So was Ted Tollner.