Los Angeles Rams WR Cooper Kupp set the fantasy football world ablaze with his 145-1,947-16 campaign in 2021, but he has missed 13 games in the two NFL seasons since, and Puka Nacua has replaced him as the toast of our industry.
Kupp turned 31 in June, and players rarely get healthier with time, but were there enough sparks last season playing alongside Nacua to justify drafting the former All-Pro as a locked-in weekly starter?
Cooper Kupp’s 2024 Fantasy Outlook
- PPR Fantasy Points: 245 (159 non-PPR)
- Receptions: 86
- Receiving Yards: 1,055
- Receiving TDs: 8
PlayerProfiler Stat of the Day🤖
Cooper Kupp only played 12 games last year but still had 4 games w/ 10+ Targets & 20+ Fantasy Points🔥
He also finished the year with the 9th most Redzone Targets & 7th highest Snap Shaređź‘€
Will he bounce back in 2024?📢#PlayerProfilerStats pic.twitter.com/iCPq1LaFot
— PlayerProfiler (@rotounderworld) March 28, 2024
These are PFN’s consensus projections, correct as of August 16. The most up-to-date projections can be found in our Who Should I Draft Tool.
Should You Draft Kupp This Year?
The concerns are well-founded in some regards and not in others. The pro-Kupp crowd will point to him missing the first month of the season and blame that for inconsistencies that simply weren’t in his profile entering the season.
- Games 1-2: 7.5 catches, 133.0 yards, and one touchdown
- Games 3-7: 2.8 catches, 25.4 yards, and zero touchdowns
- Games 8-10: 7.3 catches, 88.3 yards, and a touchdown in every game
You can take those numbers however you’d like. Either you’re out on Kupp and believe he is no longer a consistent option or you’re with me on the Kupp bandwagon and believe that his stock in drafts is tanking as the result of a single poor stretch.
In January, I dove into why Nacua is ranked outside of my top 12 WRs for 2024, and a large part of that is my faith in Kupp. The age curve at the receiver position is a moving target, and a serious bounce-back campaign could well be in the cards.
Fantasy points (half-PPR) per catch in their age-31 season:
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- Marques Colston: 2.50 points per catch (up 16% from age 30)
- Brandon Marshall: 2.61 points per catch (up 7.2% from age 30)
- Keenan Allen: 2.02 points per catch (up 2.5% from age 30)
Those are cherry-picked examples, and I’m not suggesting that every receiver ages the same way — I just want to highlight that digging a fantasy grave is a bit premature, especially as a part of an offense that was a top-five unit when healthy in 2023.
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Currently, Kupp is being drafted alongside other secondary receivers. Stefon Diggs and DeVonta Smith are in the late third-round tier, two WRs that I give less of a chance to lead their respective team in targets than I give Kupp.
As good as Nacua was last season, his reception share did fall off a cliff from where it stood during Kupp’s first three games back (38% in Weeks 5-7 and 22.5% after that). Even if you like the second-year receiver to be Matthew Stafford’s go-to target, the fact that Kupp had two more red-zone catches despite playing in five fewer games is a valuable note for fantasy managers.
Combine that with this early camp injury for Nacua and these two could well be on a collision course when it comes to ADP by the time your draft is underway. Nacua’s youth is still enough to rank him ahead of Kupp, though the gap to open this draft season was far to wide.
KEEP READING: Bye Week Schedule
The veteran receiver, in a down year, earned double-digit targets or scored in 66.7% of his games last season. Is that his floor? I view the usage as safe and the upside as intoxicating at this price — I’m not arguing that you should draft Kupp over Nacua outright, but at the price, I’m betting on a bounce-back season with him opening the season at full strength!