I can’t get Amari Cooper’s Thursday night phone-in to Dallas radio station 105.3 The Fan out of my head.
There was no big reveal about a breakthrough in new contract talks between him and the Cowboys. There was no headline-making bombshell that would serve as a signal to the rest of the league that the Pro Bowl wideout was ready to field their sure-to-be-lucrative financial offers. There was no test balloon of any sort, really.
Nothing Cooper said was even all that enlightening or interesting. He spoke of his chemistry with Dak Prescott. He talked about Byron Jones’s talents. He raved about last season’s quantum leap in Michael Gallup’s game. He expressed his eagerness to work with Mike McCarthy and even ruminated on a Dez Bryant return to Dallas. Mainly, though, he spent his seventeen minutes of airtime professing his love for the Cowboys and his desire to keep representing the organization.
Just the team’s No. 1 wide receiver basically lobbying to keep the job he already has.
Kind of a water sandwich, in terms of newsworthiness.
So why can’t I stop mentally rewinding and replaying bits of the conversation?
Because it’s Amari Cooper. Coop is a player who seems to shy away from the media more often than not. His answers are monotone. Understated. To the point. Succinctly-worded. Often overly-cerebral. Guarded. Close to the vest. One gets the impression that what he says out loud is just the very tip of the iceberg when compared to the Beautiful Mindesque mental acrobatics going on upstairs about whatever the subject happens to be.
Cooper is strategic. Calculated. Deliberate. Precise. It’s what makes him one of the best route runners in the league. Look at his Instagram feed, a carefully curated gallery stacked with snapshots that could be GQ magazine covers: a stoic-looking Coop decked out in an impeccably-cool fashion statement of an ensemble, often in front of a high-performance sports car, five-star luxe location, or an honest-to-God jet runway.
The man plays chess, for heaven’s sake. And apparently excels at it. That’s no accident.
And neither was anything about that Thursday night radio interview, I’m convinced.
The tidbits that stick with me now are the things that seemed like odd details or random throwaways when I heard them live. But because it’s Amari Cooper, I don’t think any of them were random. Or throwaways. Because Amari Cooper doesn’t believe in those things.
Take, for instance, the casual dropping of the fact that he had just returned from a vacation. In Bali. With his sister. He wasn’t rolling around on a beach, partying with some single supermodel type. He made mention of his desire to travel, to soak up other cultures, to feed his intellectual curiosity. If it all sounded exactly like something Larry Fitzgerald might say, all the better for Cooper. For any receiver in this league, that’s someone to align himself with. A nonchalant reminder to the front office that he could easily be this franchise’s Fitz was a good way to start the interview. Cooper’s small-talk travel recap? Not an accident.
The Nosebleed Seats hosts stated several times that Cooper was a few minutes late to his call-in time because he had fallen asleep. They clearly found that point entertaining. But Cooper had to have let them know that himself. If you or I oversleep, we make up some less embarrassing excuse for our tardiness or try to sweep it under the rug entirely. Cooper, though, subtly puts it out there (at least to Chris Arnold and Zach Wolchuk, knowing they might reveal it) that he was at home asleep at 9 p.m. on a Thursday, not out clubbing someplace he shouldn’t be. More ammunition in Coop’s model-citizen/right-kind-of-guy column? Not an accident.
Listen to the interview and you’ll hear several shrill chirps that call out intermittently toward the end. It’s a very familiar noise. It sounds for all the world like a smoke detector in Cooper’s house needs its batteries changed. Do I believe that Cooper purposely let that high-pitched beeping continue during his phoner just to show that he’s a regular person just like us? No. But did it do exactly that? It sure did; I’ve worried more about Amari Cooper’s smoke alarms this morning than I ever think about the ones in my own home. See? He’s not a money-grubbing prima donna; he’s just an ordinary guy who needs a few 9-volts. An accident? Probably… but a fortuitous one for the subtextual case Cooper was making with the interview.
Even the discussion about Dez Bryant seemed to have undertones. On the surface, a return by Bryant to the Cowboys would potentially cast some doubt on Cooper’s own future with the team. It might cut into his playing time. Bryant could steal away some targets in key game situations. But Cooper didn’t just welcome the notion of Bryant’s comeback, he ruminated wistfully about his own personal connection with Dez.
“Of course I would want to play with him,” Cooper said of Bryant. “I would definitely have some questions for him, because I think he’s a phenomenal player. I remember, I think it was my junior year in college, I had, like, 16 touchdowns. And I think he had, like, 16 touchdowns the same year. I can still remember that. I’ve never had double-digit touchdowns in the NFL, so I know how difficult that is. And even when I had 16 touchdowns my junior year, I know I felt like I scored a lot of touchdowns. So just him being able to do that in the NFL, I know I can learn something from him.”
It seems like Cooper is just innocently fanboying over Dez and nerding out about numbers here. The thing is, for all of Coop’s “I think”s and “like”s, he’s spot-on with his figures. (Because of course he is.) Both players tallied 16 receiving touchdowns in 2014. Bryant did it in 16 games; Cooper did it in 14. And there’s no way Cooper doesn’t know that. He’s not saying that he matched the TD total of Bryant’s career-best season but did it in fewer games, he’s just saying.
I don’t think it’s meant as a slight against Bryant. Not at all. I think Cooper genuinely believes a Bryant return could mean good things for the Cowboys offense and, by extension, him. I think Cooper would truly love to pick Bryant’s brain with questions about his game and learn whatever he can about techniques that Cooper himself marveled at, like the way he goes up to attack the ball in the air. I think Cooper senses a real opportunity to improve his own skill set, a chance he’d get by working alongside Bryant every day.
But I also think Cooper is also consciously drawing a parallel between himself and No. 88 for the front office. If they’re seriously even half-considering re-signing a 31-year-old Bryant, they’d better think even longer and harder about ponying up for Cooper, who is the same age now (25) that Bryant was when he notched that magnificent 16-score season… and will be capable of doing it again for longer.
For Cooper, hyping up a Bryant return is a win-win. If Dez comes back and the two get to play together, Cooper almost assuredly believes he’ll improve as a receiver, likely top Bryant’s stats, inevitably have the baton passed to him once and for all, and ultimately come out in an even better situation on the other side. If Bryant doesn’t come back but Cooper stays in Dallas (or vice versa), Cooper was the magnanimous one who wanted to see that potent WR tandem as much as the fans… but got cheated out of an invaluable learning experience by a stingy front office. There’s nothing for Cooper to gain by poo-pooing a Cowboys/Dez reunion, even if it’s a long shot.
Cooper said all the right things Thursday night. He’s a fine spokesman for the team, even if he’s less flashy than some of the locker room’s other personalities. Sure, what he said out loud was, “I want to be a Dallas Cowboy for life.” That was the headline, and rightly so. But there were key parts of his real message that were buried in the background and tucked into the corners of how and why he said the things he said.
It’s all a game of chess for the intellectual wide receiver. Professing his love for the organization and publicly stating his desire to retain his job may have seemed like an obvious opening move. It’s Knight to e5.
But don’t let yourself believe that Cooper wasn’t simultaneously putting another half-dozen moves in motion at every opportunity. The league’s most precise route-runner is always several steps ahead of anyone trying to cover him.
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