It’s that time of year once again! Football Absurdity will bring you a breakdown of every notable fantasy football-relevant player throughout June, July, and August. We continue with the wide receivers. Cooper Kupp had an insane, and likely unsustainable, 2021 season where he finished as the WR1 by a wide margin, making him a first-round selection in 2022. Football Absurdity’s own Walker Kelly called his crazy 2021 season, but can Cooper Kupp continue his torrid pace in 2022? Let’s take a look in his 2022 fantasy football player profile!
Cooper Kupp ADP and AAV:
Average Draft Position: WR1, 2 overall
Average Auction Value: $61.8
Cooper Kupp Statistics:
| Year | G | GS | Tgt | Rec | Yards | TD | Tgt/G | Rec/G | Rec% | Yds/Tgt | Yds/Rec |
| 2021 | 17 | 17 | 191 | 145 | 1947 | 16 | 11.24 | 8.53 | 75.9% | 10.19 | 13.43 |
| 2020 | 15 | 12 | 124 | 92 | 974 | 3 | 10.33 | 6.13 | 74.2% | 7.85 | 10.59 |
| 2019 | 16 | 14 | 134 | 94 | 1161 | 10 | 8.38 | 5.88 | 70.1% | 8.66 | 12.35 |
| Year | Std Pts | HPPR Pts | PPR Pts | Pts/G | HPPR Pts/G | PPR Pts/G | Pts/Tgt | HPPR Pts/Tgt | PPR Pts/Tgt |
| 2021 | 294.5 | 367.0 | 439.5 | 17.3 | 21.6 | 25.9 | 1.54 | 1.92 | 2.30 |
| 2020 | 116.7 | 162.7 | 208.7 | 7.8 | 10.8 | 13.9 | 0.94 | 1.31 | 1.68 |
| 2019 | 176.5 | 223.5 | 270.5 | 11.0 | 14.0 | 16.9 | 1.32 | 1.67 | 2.02 |
| Year | Air Yards | aDOT | YAC | YAC/Tgt | YAC/Rec | AYMS | Tgt MS |
| 2021 | 1641 | 9 | 846 | 4.43 | 5.83 | 33% | 32% |
| 2020 | 805 | 6.44 | 514 | 4.11 | 5.59 | 22% | 23% |
| 2019 | 1007 | 7.5 | 538 | 4.01 | 5.72 | 21% | 21% |
2022 Cooper Kupp Fantasy Football Overview:
Cooper Kupp will regress. I don’t think that it’s a hot take to say that the wide receiver will not average a league-leading 115 yards per game again this season. Probably because a wide receiver has averaged over 110 yards per game fifteen times in NFL history, no player has repeated the feat the next season, and only one player in NFL history has done it twice while playing more than a handful of games. Charley Hennigan did it in 1961 and 1964. So if you consider the Super Bowl Era the NFL, then literally no wide receiver has repeated 110 yards per game. But, it’s not all bad. Since the players involved are generally #goodatfootball, let’s look at what they did do the year after getting 110 yards instead of what they didn’t do. To make life easier, let’s cut this list down to just guys who did it post-2000.
If you remove Josh Gordon for Josh Gordon reasons, you have four instances of a player topping 110 yards since 2000. In three of those instances, the player averaged over 100 yards the following season. The one exception, 2016 Antonio Brown, averaged 86 yards per game. So, that means that we can still put 1000 yards as Kupp’s floor for 2022.
So, wildly enough, we start with 1,700 yards for Kupp, which would be the tenth-most yards of all time. That’s a weird thought, but it is what it is. We have to think about his touchdowns, as well. He scored sixteen touchdowns in seventeen games, and the average touchdown rate was one touchdown every 166 yards. Assuming Cooper Kupp gets 1,700 yards, that comes out to ten touchdowns.
So a realistic floor for Cooper Kupp is 1,700 yards and ten touchdowns. Preposterous numbers.
2022 Cooper Kupp Fantasy Football Draft Strategy:
Cooper Kupp Salary Cap Value: $65
Draft Ranking: Find out for your league settings in a Beersheet! (coming in early July)
In salary cap drafts, Cooper Kupp sets the wide receiver market. He currently goes for an average of $62 for those who want to get Kupp. Since he’s the market-setter, I am going to recommend the same thing I recommend for every market-setter: you probably want to stay away from him and get two higher-end receivers, instead. For example, his $62 could instead go toward Mike Evans ($31) and Keenan Allen ($29) with enough left over to get a candy bar (actually, you can’t, they’re $2.50 now. Come on!). So, like most (if not all) salary cap draft market-setting players, I am going to recommend that you stay away. You don’t win by paying the most money for players, you win by using that money wisely.
In snake drafts, however, it’s a whole different story. I could countenance taking Cooper Kupp as high as first overall in a PPR league, and I have no real problems with his top-half-of-the-first-round ADP right now. You have to take someone there, and the running backs this year have enough warts to justify skipping them entirely. After all, Jonathan Taylor was the lowest scoring RB1 in over half a decade, Austin Ekeler might lose out to Isaiah Spiller, Derrick Henry is 250 pounds and is coming off of a broken foot, Christian McCaffrey has played ten games in two years, Dalvin Cook has a new offense and his own injury concerns, and Najee Harris might not sustain his volume from 2021. If any of this scares you, you could be in a position to skip any (or all) of these guys to take Kupp instead. I can’t be too mad at that.
Best Case Scenario:
Cooper Kupp scores 20 touchdowns on 200 targets, with 2,000 yards to boot. They start calling him 2-2, and Tutu Atwell lets one tear slide down his cheek.
Worst Case Scenario:
The whole situation craters and Cooper Kupp averages just about 80 yards per game. He still finishes as a top-twelve wide receiver.
Check out all our 2022 player profiles, here.
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[Statistics are sourced from pro-football-reference.com, airyards.com, and ftnfantasy.com]
[Image Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Cooper_Kupp.jpg, cropped under CC BY SA 2.0]
