Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The voice of the La Rams is with us now
on the radio show from La with a Hawks signing
Cooper Cup.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
JB. How are you man?
Speaker 3 (00:07):
I wish that exaggeration or even fractionally true, so we
would all take it right. But that's okay. We all
know we would pay them to do what we get
to do, So that's fine.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
What do you do with you guys?
Speaker 1 (00:16):
You're worth fifteen million bucks in our eyes? Man, Just
remember that when you go to bed tonight. Well, let's
talk about this first of all, Cooper Cup going from
the Rams to the Seahawks. You don't often see guys
jump from division team to division team like this. You
don't see guys that miss as much time as he's
missed getting fifteen million bucks a year. Give us your
(00:36):
thoughts on kind of where Cooper Cup is right now
in his career and what the Hawks are getting in
this kid.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Yeah, I mean it runs a gamut. I'm Chris Fallin,
just having called every snap of his career so far,
and even going back to his time and Cheeney with
Eastern Washington. I remember him beating Washington State and Pullman
and being there and having the first glimpse at the
legend of Cooper Cup, one of the SCS all time greats. Personally,
I'm happy for him, given his roots in the area,
(01:04):
that he gets to continue his career. I do think
he has something left in the tank, and I'm excited
for him to get to prove it, especially in that
region where it's not just about his family and his football,
but his you know, new coffee brand shout out Dodo.
I've had some of it myself. I think it's going
to do well there in the Pacific Northwest. But you know,
purely from a football lens.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
I'm a bit confused.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
I don't know how deep into this conversation you are,
because while a lot of the things I've mentioned fit,
I don't necessarily understand it schematically, but I guess that
could be true, could be applied to a lot of
the things the Seahawks have done so far this offseason,
which is okay because you don't play games in March,
and I think that's probably the element of surprise or
the ace up their sleeve that they'll have come September.
(01:50):
Is what does it look like to have Cooper Cup
and Jackson Smith and Jigba in the same formation.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
How's that going to play.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
So you see a little bit of redundancy there. What
you man other things that the Seahawks have done. What
is confusing about what the Seahawks have done the last month?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Well, yeah, I.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Mean slot over slot is kind of what I just
mentioned there.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
I mean, Coop's one of the all time greats.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
I don't see him necessarily playing out wide. I know
he's got a really diverse skill set and offers a
lot to any offense. But I mean I think Jsm's
become one of the premier elite players at that position.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
So I would pay good money to.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
See, like how the snap count and how the alignment
looks in a full sample size at the end of
twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
We'll have to wait and see.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
I think I probably said on your airways before I
was a big Geno Smith fan. I don't think he
was given the truest or fairest opportunity to succeed there,
primarily with the offensive line in front of him, and
even though the Rams had some good success against him,
I think he was maybe as good as the second
(02:54):
best quarterback in the division. And so to see him
go to a different team and be replaced by Sam
Darnald doesn't necessarily check out again here in the spring,
and then the Metcalf saying, yeah, I don't want to
speak for your audience. You guys know it better than
(03:14):
I do. But just looking at it from a division
rivals lens, I don't think it's hard to make the
case that the Rams, maybe the Cardinals will see about
the Niners will hopefully have gained some ground relative to
the Seahawks, who were, let's face it, overtime walkoff touchdown
away from being in the Rams shoes at the.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
End of last season, right, no doubt.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Well, there's a lot of people, JB that share your
opinion on Donald versus Gino. You're not alone in that regard.
But I do want to ask you. Getting back to
Cooper Cup for a second, JB. Long, the voice of
the Rams, the Hawks are going to sign Cooper Cup
to a three year, forty five million dollar deal. He's
coming back home to the state of Washington. The guy
that we saw four years ago who was the AP
Offensive Player of the Year. He was twenty eight years old.
(03:57):
Well now he's going to be thirty two. How much
which as he lost off his fastball since that season?
Speaker 3 (04:04):
You know, I saw some kind of next gen metrics
about separation kind of tilting against him over the last
few years, and I think that's probably fair. I think
that's a data point that's worth monitoring. I will say
there were a large swaths of last season where Cooper
Cup looked more like twenty twenty one Cooper than twenty
two or twenty three. You look at what he did
(04:26):
drawing plays up in the sand basically in the second
half with Matthew Stafford in Week one at Detroit.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
That was something to behold.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
And I knew then, and I said as much on
our airways, that wouldn't be sustainable being targeted twenty one
times in a game, not for him, not for anybody.
But even when he came back from his injury in
the middle of that season, side by side with Pooke,
it looked great. I was believing. Again, can't exactly speak
to what happened at the tail end of last season.
(04:56):
It wasn't specifically health related, though it did look at
time like he was probably running gingerly and wasn't getting
nearly amount of separation that we've become accustomed to, And
clearly his target share and usage fell dramatically.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
As far as the injuries go, give us some more
insight on those. Are they just are they nagging? Are
they just persistent? Is it something that he's just going
to have to deal with or has there been some
bad luck involved there too?
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (05:23):
I mean I think it's all of those things, right.
I think usage rate has to be mentioned with respect
to cupp and health and not just the fact that
he's running routes or getting balls on his way, but
the fact that he plays like a full back or
a tight end. We've all seen him, including your audience,
like fit up into the running service and root out
a linebacker or a safety. I always tell our fans like, yeah,
(05:44):
he won the Triple Crown in twenty one. He won
the Quadruple Crown. He was the best blocking receiver in football.
And it's something he'll never get enough credit for. I
think it's something he can definitely bring to Kubiak and
the Seahawks and we'll have real value in that regard.
But when you're on the right side of thirty and
you're doing that willingly and eagerly, yeah, I do think
you expose yourself to more of those moments, which is unfortunate,
(06:08):
but it is quint essentially the Cooper Cup experience, and
it's what makes him so easy to root for. Yeah,
and such a valuable component to everything that he and
McVeigh and the Rams have done together.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Well. JB. Long is with us a voice of the Rams.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
And look, man, those ankle injuries, especially for players like
guys in the NFL, they're like herpes.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
They don't ever go away. They just kind of hang around, man.
I mean, and.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Cooper Cup, dude, Game one, first game of the year
against the Lions, twenty one targets in the opener a
year ago, fourteen catches, then he gets hurt in the
cardinal game, misses three games, and really was never consistently
the same. So I'm just kind of wondering if if
Cooper Cup hadn't gotten hurt, is he a Seahawk right now?
Speaker 2 (06:54):
It's a great question.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
I mean, I'd love to see that parallel universe. Believe me,
I like him better as a Ram than for any
of the other three one teams. It's not something that
I think any of us wish for.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
You know, something that.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Matthew Stafford said about this offseason stuck with me, which
is that Cooper loves the work, and I think the
reason so many of us were bullish on his chances
to come back and put up great numbers, which he did,
especially on a per game average in twenty twenty four,
is because he and Matthew had a healthy offseason together
for the first time since their Super Bowl, their first
(07:26):
year together. You know, that hadn't happened in twenty two
or twenty three. So I wish that for Cooper. I
wish that for Sam Donald and the Seahawks because I'll
be rooting for him fifteen times per year.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
You know.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
The other thing, I don't know if you guys have
touched on this yet or not, but Cooper's been pretty
outspoken about preferring the natural grass surface and thinking that,
you know, as many stadiums as possible should replace their
turf with grass. Clearly that's not going to be the
case for his home games next year. I haven't scanned
the Seahawks opposing schedule to see how much of that
is true. You know, thankfully, staying in the NFC West,
(07:59):
he gets to play and say San Francisco and Arizona
a couple of natural surfaces there, so that might be
something to diggle layer deeper. On just as he tries
to extend his prime, which again I hope for him
and I believe still has a year or two left
on it.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
I want that to be true. JB.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
You alluded to DK a couple of minutes ago, and
we're a bit confused. So you're saying that you would
have made DK Metcalf the third highest wide receiver in
football if you were you were the Seahawks.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
Yeah, I mean that's a different way of framing it, right.
It is a big price tag. I get it. I
understand that his skill set is not necessarily as complete
as some of those other piers in that s tier
who are getting that level of compensation. And so if
you're saying that you want to get out of the
(08:46):
DK business and move on with the next chapter of whatever,
this receiving core is going to look like. Okay, that's fair.
I don't think I can fault a front office for
doing that. I know that he struck fear into many teams,
including the Rams, and I think his battles against Jalen
Ramsey in particular, some of my all time favorites and
covering the National Football League. So if they feel like
(09:06):
they have a viable alternative that they feel like they
can get better by subtraction.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
More power to them. We'll see how that plays.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
I just know from a division rivals lens, there's no
spinning this any other direction other than relief or optimism
that he's not playing in a different conference.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
If that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Well, I'm looking at that just to kind of go
with your little point about the natural grass. Obviously, eight
games at home on the turf, Cardinals turf, Rams, turf, Falcons, turf.
Panthers play on turf, just looked it up. The Niners, Jaguars,
Commanders Pittsburgh, so four games so play on grass. Of
the seventeen. But tell folks, what kind of guy we're getting, right,
(09:47):
I Mean we all think we're getting a good guy,
but I haven't talked to him or covered him in
all since that Eastern game against the Huskies a jillion
years ago.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
What kind of guy we're getting?
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Yeah, I mean, that's the easiest question you ask, and
I ca give you anything higher than ten out of ten.
I mean, you're getting someone who's going to be great
for your team. You're building your fan base, your city,
your community, all all those things. And that's why I
think a lot of the early reaction that I've seen
so far is all right, well, you don't love to see,
you know, one of your hometown favorites join the rival,
(10:18):
but it almost has.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
And maybe I'm over speaking here.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Tell me if I am a little bit of like
the Bobby Wagner effect right where you know, Bobby was
the arrival and a really competitive one for all those years.
But my gosh, that year he had with the Rams
was super enjoyable and he was very easy to adopt
as one of your own, even though you knew him
as an enemy rather than a friend for much of
his career. I think that same experience will hold true
(10:43):
for Cooper Cup. And look, I'll say this clearly, there
are entities betting against you know, his twenty twenty five
and beyond.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
But isn't that the Cooper Cup experience?
Speaker 3 (10:54):
I mean, go back to who he was as a
middle schooler, high schooler, college player, draft pick like Cooper
Cupp believe that his best is still yet to come.
Because that belief and maybe it's maybe it's misaligned, maybe
it's naive, but bad belief is the only reason why
he's a Super Bowl MVP. So I'm not going to
begrudge him for it, and I know your.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Seahawks fans won't either. JB.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Long, great stuff, Man, appreciate this. The Rams Seahawks rivalry,
uh just got a little bit more heated with Cooper
Cup signing with the Seahawks. I love it, great stuff,
and we'll talk down there. I appreciate it, man, all.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
Right, appreciate the invitation, and glad Cooper Cuff is coming
home in regard.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
You bet JB.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Long with us on a daylight today. When the Seahawks
make an acquisition like Cooper Cup, we cannot go the
entire show without hearing from our QB one. Hum Millan's
voice extremely important at times like this. Nobody will be
able to break this down the way he will. Next
on ninety three to three KJRFM,