Just before the Rams had their bye in Week 9, Cooper Kupp put together the best performance of his career – and one of the best games in franchise history. Apparently, that week off broke any sort of momentum Kupp was gaining because since then, he’s been mediocre, at best.
In that Week 8 game against the Bengals, Kupp caught seven passes for 220 yards and one touchdown. It was his first career 200-yard game and the fifth 100-yard game of 2019. In the six games since then, he’s caught 25 of 33 targets for only 239 yards and three touchdowns.
Kupp is averaging only 7.2 yards per target in his last six games, whereas in that game against Cincinnati in London, he averaged 22 yards per target – an admittedly impossible rate to maintain.
The Rams are only 3-3 in those six games since Kupp’s huge performance and he’s only been targeted more than six times in a game once. In the first half of the season (eight games), he had seven-plus targets in a game seven times and had four games with at least 10 targets.
In other words, he was Jared Goff’s favorite target, and it wasn’t particularly close. The question now is, what happened?
It’s not necessarily the result of Kupp suddenly becoming an ineffective receiver. He’s caught all 16 of his targets in the last three weeks and has a catch rate of 86.2% – the highest of any player in the NFL with at least 20 catches in that span.
He isn’t dropping passes, he simply isn’t getting many opportunities in the passing game. Sean McVay has opted for more usage of 12 personnel, which takes a receiver off the field in favor of a tight end. Some of the time, that’s been Kupp – especially in Weeks 13 and 14. He played just 72% of the snaps in Week 13 against the Cardinals and a minuscule 28% against Seattle.
Robert Woods has supplanted Kupp as the top option for Goff in the second half of the season, being targeted 56 times in five games. He’s hardly come off the field for the Rams, catching 37 passes for 479 yards and one touchdown since the bye.
Tyler Higbee is also getting more playing time with Gerald Everett out and is taking a big chunk of the targets away from Kupp. In the last four weeks, Higbee has 31 catches on 39 targets for 354 yards. In that same stretch, Kupp has 22 catches (26 targets) for 186 yards.
Kupp is an important player on offense, which makes his usage since the Week 9 bye hard to understand. We all saw what happened when he was lost to a torn ACL last season, as Goff’s efficiency dropped off a cliff.
The Rams must get Kupp going against the 49ers, who boast an elite pass defense that’s “up there in league history,” according to McVay. In the slot, Kupp can be a reliable weapon for Goff when given opportunities. Those opportunities have just been hard to come by lately.