Tag: Amari Cooper

Broncos won’t trade for Amari Cooper, but could they target another Browns player?

After the Browns traded Amari Cooper to the Bills, the Broncos should call about David Njoku’s status.

With the NFL trade deadline (Nov. 5) now just three weeks away, Denver Broncos fans and pundits have speculated that the team could trade for a wide receiver like Amari Cooper or Tee Higgins to spark the offense.

One of those receivers is no longer available on the trade block.

The Cleveland Browns have agreed to trade Cooper to the Buffalo Bills in exchange for a third-round draft pick (full trade details). The Browns now won’t have Cooper when they face the Broncos on Monday Night Football at Empower Field at Mile High in Week 13 on Dec. 2.

So Cooper won’t land in Denver and he won’t play against the Broncos this fall, but another player in Cleveland is worth monitoring.

The Browns are currently 1-5 and they might have a fire sale leading up to the trade deadline. Denver general manager George Paton should call Cleveland about the status of tight end David Njoku, a 28-year-old veteran who recently recovered from an ankle injury.

The Broncos haven’t gotten any production out of their tight ends this season and former third-round draft pick Greg Dulcich has been a healthy scratch over the last two weeks. Rookie quarterback Bo Nix could use a reliable, play-making tight end in an offense that lacks weapons.

If Denver remains in the playoff hunt leading up to the NFL’s trade deadline, making an offer for Njoku would make sense.

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2 of Dolphins’ AFC East rivals added more offensive firepower

With the trade deadline still three weeks away, the Jets and Bills made early moves to add playmakers on offense.

The NFL trade deadline is still three weeks away, but the Buffalo Bills and New York Jets didn’t wait around to decide if they’re going to make moves. On Tuesday, the two AFC East teams added a pair of receivers with 11 combined Pro Bowl nods.

First, the Jets reached a deal with the Las Vegas Raiders to acquire six-time Pro Bowler Davante Adams, reuniting him with his former Green Bay Packers teammate, Aaron Rodgers.

Not long after, the Bills made a move to land five-time Pro Bowler Amari Cooper in a trade with the Cleveland Browns.

Both teams are set to lose third-round picks as part of the deals, which could eventually be costly if the 30- and 31-year-old receivers don’t immediately help their new squads. But that won’t make life any easier for the Dolphins in 2024.

Already facing an uphill climb in the AFC East, Miami will now face the Bills offense in Week 9 with Cooper added to the fold, and the Dolphins still have two matchups against the Jets on the docket in Weeks 14 and 18.

ESPN is giving the Dolphins just a one percent chance at winning the division and a nine percent chance at the postseason. A little more firepower for the two teams that are most in Miami’s way of the playoffs isn’t the most welcomed news for the team.

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Former Eagles safety leads the Browns in TDs after Amari Cooper is traded to Bills

Former Eagles safety Rodney McLeod leads the Browns in TD after Amari Cooper is traded to Bills

If you ever need to know why an NFL team is struggling, the details are in the analytics and game stats.

The Bills acquired Amari Cooper in a trade Tuesday with the Browns, adding a true No. 1 wide receiver for quarterback Josh Allen.

Buffalo received Cooper and a 2025 sixth-round draft pick in exchange for a 2025 third-round pick and a 2026 seventh-round selection.

Cooper, 30, fills the Bills’ No. 1 receiver void, which was opened when the team traded Stefon Diggs to the Houston Texans before the season.

With the former Alabama star traded away, former Eagles and current Browns safety Rodney McLeod is the top scorer on the team this season.

Through six games (1-5), McLeod leads Cleveland in touchdowns, scoring with two, including the blocked field goal by All-Pro Myles Garrett, which McLeod Jr. scooped and returned untouched to the end zone.

Cooper produced 2,660 yards and 16 touchdowns over two-plus seasons in Cleveland.

Cooper leads Cleveland with 250 receiving yards and two touchdowns, but his 4.7 yards per target ranks second worst in the NFL among qualifying pass catchers. His three drops are also tied for the sixth most in the league, and the Browns offense has failed to score 20 points in each of its first six games.

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Bills trade for WR Amari Cooper, will face Seahawks in Week 8

Bills trade for WR Amari Cooper, will face Seahawks in Week 8

It has been a notable day of trades in the NFL. The New York Jets kicked things off by reuniting wide receiver Davante Adams with quarterback Aaron Rodgers with a blockbuster trade. However, the Jets were not the only AFC East team to make moves to improve their receiving corps.

The Buffalo Bills, who defeated the Jets on Monday Night Football, did not rest on their laurels. They went out and acquired former Raiders, Cowboys and Browns wide receiver Amari Cooper on Tuesday. For the third time in his career, Cooper has a new home via trade.

Buffalo may be 4-2 and one of the top Super Bowl contenders in the AFC, but it is fair to say their offensive weaponry is a bit light. It’s quarterback Josh Allen and… not much else. Allen is good enough to carry an offense, but the Bills realized their superstar quarterback needs more help. So now he has a wide receiver with 691 career receptions for 9,736 yards and 62 touchdowns.

Cooper has eclipsed the 1,000+ receiving yard mark in four of the last five seasons, including a career-best 1,250 last season for the otherwise offensively-inept Cleveland Browns. At age 30, Cooper is a bit long in the tooth by NFL standards, but he is more than capable of being an effective weapon for a quarterback to utilize.

Unfortunately, this means the Seattle Seahawks are going to have one more factor to deal with when they host the Bills in two weeks. Seattle has a brutal stretch of games on the horizon. After they play the Falcons in Atlanta, they will face off against the Bills for the first time since Josh Allen and Co.  dismantled the Hawks 44-34 during the 2020 season.

The Seahawks defense is hurting, both physically health wise and on the field. They are having difficulty stopping the run, bringing down quarterbacks who can move, and generating turnovers. Allen can either be entirely too loose with the football, or play at an elite level to torch any secondary. If Seattle can’t shore things up here in the next few weeks, Allen and Cooper aren’t going to face much resistance.

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The Bills’ trade for Amari Cooper is an act of mercy for him and Josh Allen

Cooper is on the wrong side of 30, but he thrives in a new scenario — especially if Deshaun Watson isn’t involved.

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.

https://twitter.com/RapSheet/status/1846254022094635130

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.

Steelers AFC North foe trades away star wide receiver

The Browns have traded away wide receiver Amari Cooper.

There has been lots of wide receiver news on Tuesday but unfortunately none of it has directly involved the Pittsburgh Steelers. First we get word that Davante Adams signed with the New York Jets, leaving the Steelers high and dry.

Now, the Cleveland Browns have traded away their best receiver, Amari Cooper to the Buffalo Bills. This is according to NFL reporter Jordan Schultz.

The Browns are off to a miserable 1-5 start and it looks like they are going to sell off players to get some draft capital since they are handcuffed to Deshaun Watson’s massive waste of a contract.

Nevertheless, even though we are ok with the Browns giving up on the season, it stings to see another talented wide receiver hit the market and land with an AFC opponent. At the same time, the Steelers continue to flounder at the wide receiver position.

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Browns release statement on the trade of Amari Cooper

The Browns have released a statement on the trade of Amari Cooper to the Bills

After a rough start to his season, leading the NFL in drops, wide receiver Amari Cooper gets a fresh start after the Cleveland Browns traded him to the Buffalo Bills.

As the Browns look to potentially collect draft assets for older veterans, Cooper now teams up with Josh Allen. The Browns released a statement on the trade as well.

Here is what Berry had to say on the trade of their top wide receiver over the past two seasons:

“We appreciate Amari’s hard work, professionalism, and on-field contributions throughout his two-plus seasons with us. He created many memorable moments with us and was an integral part of our 2023 playoff team. We wish him the best in Buffalo.”

Sitting at 1-5 on the season, Cooper may not be the last player on the other side of 30 years old to get shipped out of Cleveland for draft assets. Players like Za’Darius Smith and Dalvin Tomlinson could also get calls from other teams around the league.

For Cooper, he now gets the chance to compete on a team with Super Bowl aspirations.

Davante Adams trade sets market as another former Raiders receiver switches teams

Another former Raiders receiver was traded Tuesday for similar compensation.

Just hours after the Raiders sent Davante Adams to the Jets in exchange for a conditional third round pick, another former Raiders receiver is being moved for similar compensation.

Former Raiders top pick Amari Cooper has been traded by the Browns to the Bills for a third round pick. The two teams also swap late round picks in the deal.

This will be the third time in Cooper’s career he’s been traded and his fourth NFL team. He was originally selected by the Raiders with the fourth overall pick in the 2015 draft out of Alabama.

Midway through his fourth season, the Raiders traded Cooper to Dallas in exchange for a first round pick. He lasted the exact same amount of time in Dallas before they traded him to Cleveland. Now midway through his third season with the Browns, he’s shipped again.

Cooper is just a year younger than Adams, and was selected the year after Adams, so they are basically in the same place in their careers.

With it happening so quickly after the Adams trade, it would seem the Browns and Bills were waiting to see what seemed like the going rate for a 30-year-old Pro Bowl receiver. Funny how these things are all connected.

Amari Cooper trade grades: Who won the Bills and Browns deal?

Breaking down the blockbuster Amari Cooper trade that gives Josh Allen a star receiver again.

We’re still weeks away from the NFL trade deadline, and the trades for star playmakers are already flying in.

After the New York Jets traded for Davante Adams from the fledgling Las Vegas Raiders early Tuesday morning, the Buffalo Bills arguably one-upped their AFC East rivals by acquiring Amari Cooper from the Cleveland Browns.

This is a big deal for Cooper, who escapes the NFL’s worst quarterback situation. It’s even bigger for Josh Allen, who desperately needed a go-to playmaker on a Bills team that is still rightfully dreaming of winning the Super Bowl.

Let’s break it all down and hand out some grades.

The details

  • Bills get: WR Amari Cooper, a 2025 sixth-round draft pick
  • Browns get: A 2025 third-round draft pick, a 2026 seventh-round draft pick

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Buffalo Bills

Sam Navarro-Imagn Images

The Bills are 4-2 and sitting in a comfortable first place in the AFC East. But they’ve shown a lot more cracks in the armor than in the past — especially on offense.

While Josh Allen remains exceptional, Buffalo didn’t have a “gotta have it” playmaker in the wake of Stefon Diggs’ departure in the offseason. While the Bills remained a strong playoff contender, it would’ve been silly to assume this set-up could’ve help them overcome actual AFC heavyweights in the postseason.

Enter Cooper, Allen’s new best friend.

A five-time Pro Bowler, Cooper has languished in the Browns’ morose offense over the last few seasons. Now, he gets one of the NFL’s premier quarterbacks going out of his way to find him downfield 10-15 times a game. He gives Buffalo a much-needed dimension to really compete with the big boys and pursue the organization’s first-ever Lombardi Trophy in earnest again.

The 30-year-old Cooper is technically a rental to the Bills, as he is set to be an unrestricted free agent this spring. But it’s worth sending off a Day 2 draft pick for a rental as a team with legitimate championship aspirations.

Grade: A

Cleveland Browns

Oct 6, 2024; Landover, Maryland, USA; Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson (4) waits for a play during the fourth quarter against the Washington Commanders at NorthWest Stadium.
Peter Casey-Imagn Images

I can’t believe the Browns finally waved the white towel. Kevin Stefanski’s steadfast refusal to bench Deshaun Watson sure made it seem like Cleveland was hell-bent on going down with the ship with a quarterback once accused of sexual misconduct by more than 20 women in what the NFL would later characterize as “predatory behavior.”

Which, to be clear, these pitiful Browns should’ve always been sellers. Kudos to them for recouping great high-end value for a slightly older playmaker that they weren’t going to resign anyway.

Of course, the Browns’ drafting history suggests the third-rounder they get from the Cooper trade won’t turn into a meaningful player. (Sorry, Browns fans.) But it’s always better to get quality assets for the future rather than not.

For once, Cleveland did something smart compared to the last few years.

Grade: A

Bills are trading for Browns WR Amari Cooper

Like the Jets, the Bills have made a big move at wide receiver by acquiring Amari Cooper from the Browns

The New York Jets aren’t the only AFC East team taking a big swing at wide receiver. The Buffalo Bills are, too.

Just hours after the Jets acquired Davante Adams from the Raiders, the Bills made a move of their own. According to reports, the Bills are trading for Browns wide receiver Amari Cooper.

Buffalo will send a 2025 third-round pick and a 2026 seventh-rounder to the Browns for Cooper and a 2025 sixth-rounder. The Bills now have their WR1 replacement for Stefon Diggs, who was traded to the Texans in the offseason.

In six games this season, Cooper has caught 24 passes for 250 yards and two touchdowns as the Browns’ top receiver for Deshaun Watson.