The Rams extended Cooper Kupp when they didn’t need to and now they’re paying the price for it
Cooper Kupp has been playing on borrowed time since he turned 30 and the only thing surprising about his own announcement that the Rams are trying to trade him is that the team thinks they can get a team to take his contract.
As we noted at Turf Show Times last week, Kupp’s $20 million owed in 2025 is far too much to expect a team to trade for him without some really unusual circumstances. At age 32, missing games for three consecutive seasons, and posting the worst numbers of his career in the last two years, it would make very little (aka no) sense for a team to trade for Cooper Kupp now.
If a team acquires Kupp’s $20 million, that alone makes him the 15th-highest paid receiver in the NFL in 2025. However, several players ahead of him will be released, traded, or take pay cuts. At the end of the day, Kupp’s $20 million would end up as a top-10 cap hit in the NFL, which is nowhere close to where he is as a player anymore.
Instead, his best bet would be to try and emulate the path of Adam Thielen when he was cut by the Vikings and signed with the Panthers. Thielen’s cap hit in 2025 is $8 million.
Of course, this was a situation that the Rams could have avoided simply by not extending a 29-year-old receiver in 2022 when they were under no obligation to touch his contract. Regardless, the Rams went ahead and gave out raises to Kupp, Aaron Donald, and Matthew Stafford, all of which they will be paying the price for heavily in 2024 and 2025.
Here’s what I wrote about Kupp in December of 2021, at the tail end of his triple-crown season:
In saying nothing negative at all about Cooper Kupp whatsoever, I am confident that 2021 will be the best season of his career. Probably by a lot. That’s what happens when a wide receiver challenges for MVP and Offensive Player of the Year; it’s not like being Aaron Donald or a quarterback, very few players lead the NFL in receiving more than once.
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Cooper Kupp is the best wide receiver in the NFL this year. One question to ponder is where Kupp will be ranked in two years; another is whether or not the top-ranked player in two years is even in the NFL yet.
Since Kupp’s monster season in 2021, he has had 812, 737, and 710 yards in the past three years, respectively. He has missed at least 5 games in each season. He has posted the worst success rates of his career in 2023 and 2024. All of these happenings were predictable, which is why they I predicted it: Not to be “negative” about a legendary Rams player, but because this is the way the world works.
I also wrote then that the Rams should not extend Kupp after the 2021 season, which is exactly what they did anyway. Because they did, Kupp has been overpaid and his contract is almost impossible to trade.
But hey, at least they also seem to be parting on bad terms.
