Amari Cooper doesn’t have to worry about playing with a historically bad quarterback anymore. Josh Allen doesn’t have to operate an offense in which Mack Hollins and Curtis Samuel are vital cogs.
And so with Tuesday’s trade, Cooper gets a win. The Buffalo Bills get a win. Deshaun Watson, well, at least now he’s got an excuse for why the Cleveland Browns offense is so toothless.
The Browns and Bills swung the second deal of a burgeoning trade deadline season. Cleveland moved its top wideout east to simultaneously wave a white flag on a lost season and reinforce the idea the team was never going to extend Cooper. Buffalo, confronted with an opportunity to run away with a suddenly toothless AFC East and having watched the New York Jets bring Davante Adams into the fold, gave up a third round pick to prevent getting caught from behind.
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The trade is a massive upgrade for both wideout and quarterback. Cooper has generally underwhelmed alongside Watson and 2024 has been no exception. His 41.7 receiving yards per game are a career low. That’s a warning sign for a 30-year-old receiver, but there’s reason to believe a new quarterback can revive him to Pro Bowl status.
We’ve seen it before. Cooper was disinterested as an Oakland Raider, then moved to Dallas and saw his receiving yards jump by nearly 35 per game after an in-season trade. Leaving the Cowboys led to another statistical jump. He had 57 catches for 792 yards and seven touchdowns in his first 11 games as a Brown — the stretch in which Jacoby Brissett took snaps while Watson sat out a suspension stemming from more than 20 accusations of sexual misconduct and what the NFL itself described as “predatory behavior.”
When Watson was injured in 2023 and replaced with a mélange of backups, he eventually thrived alongside a 38-year-old Joe Flacco thanks to Flacco’s willingness to take chances downfield. In fact, break up Cooper’s Cleveland career and you notice a pattern in his output whenever the Browns’ failed franchise quarterback steps into the lineup.
Amari Cooper’s production as a Brown:
- 2022, Games 1 through 11 (primary QB Jacoby Brissett): 5.2 catches, 72 yards, 0.6 touchdowns per game. 8.5 yards per target
- 2022, Game 12 through 2023, Game 6 (primary QB Deshaun Watson): 3.8 catches, 63.1 yards, 0.3 TD/game. 8.8 yards/target
- 2023, Games 7 though 15 (primary QB Joe Flacco): 5.3 catches, 93.7 yards, 0.4 TD/game. 10.6 yards/target
- 2024 (primary QB Watson): 4.0 catches, 41.7 yards, 0.3 TD/game. 4.7 yards/target
This is a player who is much better when Watson is usurped by even a replacement level quarterback. Now he gets an MVP candidate with an anti-aircraft gun for an arm. Cooper is the nerdy girl in a teenage romantic comedy. Allen is here, ready to take off his glasses and paint-stained overalls to realize, whoops, he’s a smokeshow.
That’s a big deal for Buffalo. Stefon Diggs’ absence left a hole at the top of a thin depth chart. While Allen is playing some of the most efficient football of his career his downfield passing game has suffered slightly. His 5.3 air yards per completion are by far a career low. He only has five deep completions (20-plus yards downfield) in six games and his 23.8 percent completion rate on such throws is also a career low, per SIS.
Cooper isn’t exactly what you’d expect from a field-stretching deep threat, but he can get there. His minimum average target distance as a Brown is 12.1 yards downfield — a number that rose to 14-plus yards in 2023 with Flacco lobbing bombs from the pocket. His presence as an intermediate and deep threat not only takes the pressure off Hollins and Marquez Valdes-Scantling on those routes, but should pull defensive focus away from a blossoming Keon Coleman and tight end Dalton Kincaid.
There’s risk involved for the Bills. Cooper struggled with drops throughout his Browns tenure but 2024 has plumbed a new low. His nine drops — a 17 percent drop rate! — are four more than any other player in the league, per Pro Football Reference. ESPN only credits him with three, which is better but still not great. His 0.77 yards per route run rank 91st out of 120 qualified receivers.
But Cooper averaged 1.97 YPRR in 2022 (18th) and 2.22 in 2023 (16th), which suggests his quarterback may be more of a factor than his age. While Buffalo can’t replicate the freeing effect of having Nick Chubb in the backfield, it can at least come close with James Cook and Ray Davis.
With one move, Cooper was delivered from a quarterback with whom he’s not compatible and added him to an offense led by an MVP frontrunner. Allen received a player who can revive his deep passing game after an early hibernation.
The Browns got a third round pick and more ammunition in their battle to sink all the way to the top spot in the 2025 NFL Draft. That’s bad news for Watson and even worse news for Kevin Stefanski, the two-time NFL Coach of the Year who may wind up on the hot seat because he was able to take Flacco and Baker Mayfield to the playoffs but not the human disaster for whom the franchise once mortgaged its future.
That’s not quite a win-win-win when it comes to conflict resolution. But it’s close.