San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Quest to replace Cooper now tougher
DALLAS — I would say the Cowboys didn’t know what they were doing when they traded Amari Cooper to Cleveland two weeks ago, but that sounds almost mean so I will just say (for the moment) that they didn’t know what they were starting.
And this musical chairs game involving the trading of elite receivers does not benefit a Dallas team looking for Cooper’s replacement in next month’s draft.
The Green Bay Packers decided not to deal with another disgruntled superstar after paying the league’s whiniest superstar $50 million a season and so they sent Aaron Rodgers’ favorite target — sometimes his only target — to the Raiders.
Now Green Bay is looking for the next Davante Adams in the draft.
Then came the shocking news that Kansas City was sending its electrifying wide receiver, Tyreek Hill, to Miami. The Chiefs, who received a king’s ransom in picks from the Dolphins as opposed to the fifth-rounder the Cowboys tugged out of Cleveland for Cooper, will be looking for the next game-breaker on April 28 as well.
You might think this is a zerosum game — one team creates a receiving void, one team fills one. But when you’re talking about the top teams in the league with the game’s best quarterbacks and the knowledge of what Adams and Hill meant to past success, there’s an urgency to get busy in Round 1. With others, the search for wide receivers might simply be on par with looking for talent upgrades at other positions.
I don’t necessarily think Dallas was determined to use its first-round pick on a wide receiver although the Cowboys stunned a lot of people by doing exactly that with CeeDee Lamb two years ago. Now they need someone to play opposite Lamb,
especially in the early games next fall when one has to assume Michael Gallup will not be fully recovered from a torn ACL suffered in January.
But if the Cowboys were hoping to land a wide receiver with the 24th pick, it has become much more difficult. Green Bay now drafts in front of Dallas. With the 22nd and 28th picks plus a pair of twos, the Packers have draft capital to spare. Philadelphia, forever in need of wide receiving help, owns the 15th, 16th and 19th picks and is all but certain to use one selection on a wide receiver. Kansas City has two first-round picks after Dallas’ choice (29th, 30th), but the Chiefs own six picks in the first three rounds, so there are countless ways for them to move up ahead of Dallas in search of help for Patrick Mahomes.
In Mel Kiper’s latest mock
draft for ESPN, he has four wide receivers picked before Dallas gets on the board and two more going in the first round after the Cowboys’ pick. Both of Ohio State’s elite receivers who skipped the Rose Bowl, Chris Olive and Garrett Wilson, along with Alabama’s Jameson Williams, who tore his ACL in the national championship game against Georgia, are picked ahead of Dallas in the mock draft.
(You know the Cowboys would have to covet a wide receiver with a damaged knee although history tells us Dallas likes to make those kinds of picks in the second round).
Regardless, it has been a most surprising offseason regarding wide receivers. Cooper Kupp caught passes for 1,947 yards last season and went on to capture the Super Bowl MVP. Cincinnati’s
Ja’Marr Chase had one of the best receiving years ever for a rookie and the Bengals made it to the Super Bowl. Whatever happened to the NFL being a copycat league?
Instead, we see some of the game’s best receivers on the move for a variety of reasons. I am not saying Cooper competes on the same level as Adams and Hill. Those two would rank in anybody’s top five, no matter what measuring stick is being used. Cooper is below that, but he’s surely in everyone’s top 20 and would have been positioned higher than that prior to last season.
Still, the Cowboys find themselves in need of replacements not only for Cooper but for Cedrick Wilson as well. Wilson took advantage of Cooper’s COVID-enforced absence to catch passes for 104 yards against the Raiders on Thanksgiving Day and finished the season with more than 600 yards despite carrying the third wide receiver tag for most of the year. He cashed in with a threeyear $22 million deal in Miami and could find himself making a lot more money for even fewer targets while playing behind Hill and Jaylen Waddle.
That’s his problem. The Cowboys think they have replaced one of their lost receivers with James Washington, but that could be a reach. The former Steelers second-round pick had only one 400-yard season out of four and his starts in Pittsburgh went from six to 10 to seven to two.
That doesn’t mean he can’t replace Wilson’s skill level. It just suggests there are no guarantees.
Meanwhile, the Cowboys search for more help. If the plan is to wait quietly for Gallup to return, perhaps exhaust much of the 2022 season in doing so, it’s an exercise in patience a team with real championship ambitions should never contemplate.