Review: Amari Cooper is a game changer for the Cowboys offense, after all

The Dallas Cowboys took a huge risk by trading a first-round pick for Amari Cooper, and the immediate return didn’t look great. After about two weeks of practicing with the team, Cooper made his Cowboys debut in Week 9 with five receptions for 58 yards and a touchdown.

It was a decent enough showing for Cooper, but the Cowboys offense as a whole looked as bad as ever. The Titans cruised to a 28-14 win to drop Dallas to 3-5, and the loss of a top draft pick only to get more of the same looked regrettable.

It actually looked like a winning trade for Jon Gruden — one of the only wins for Gruden since he was hired as the Raiders head coach in January.

Since then, the Cowboys have rattled off three consecutive wins, the offense has finally found a rhythm, and Dallas is sitting atop the NFC East.

On Thanksgiving, Cooper showed out. He caught eight passes for 180 yards and two touchdowns — including a 90-yard explosion straight through the Washington secondary.

It was the longest catch of his career so far.

With Cooper producing, the Cowboys scored more than 21 points in three consecutive games all season.

Dallas traded for Cooper because the team thought he’d transform the offense. So far, it looks like an intuitive move. Let’s review:

Through 12 weeks, the Cowboys are 28th in pass plays for 20 yards or more. In seven games without Cooper, Dallas had 16 of those plays. In the four games since trading for Cooper, the Cowboys have 12.

Against Washington alone, Cooper had touchdown receptions of 40 and 90 yards.

That’s a big difference for a Cowboys offense that has relied on Ezekiel Elliott and just about nobody else to produce big plays in the last three seasons.

It’s also been a revelation for Cooper.

The 2015 first-round pick quickly emerged as one of the most dangerous, young deep threats in the NFL as a rookie with six receptions for more than 40 yards. That number dropped to just two in 2016 and three in 2017. In his first six games of 2018 while with the Raiders, he had zero.

It’s helped that the Cowboys have used him like the dangerous game-breaker that he was billed to be as a draft prospect.

The Cowboys still aren’t a team that’s likely to have a shootout that looks like anything like the outrageous Rams-Chiefs duel in Week 11. They lean on a powerful rushing attack and sound defense to get the job done. But the threat of Cooper busting teams deep has made the offense more threatening, and opened things up for what it does best.

Cooper is Ezekiel Elliott’s new best friend.

In the last three weeks, Elliott has 394 rushing yards, 137 receiving yards, and four touchdowns. It’s his first streak of three straight games over 120 rushing yards since October of his rookie year.

That’s — at least, in part — a consequence of Cooper’s arrival.

“You’re getting a guy or half a guy out of the box, and it’s just one less guy to worry about,” Elliott said earlier this month, via Sports Illustrated. “It seems like [Cooper] was kind of the missing piece, because when he got here the offense started rolling.”

Elliott has been difficult to stop even if a defense stacks eight players near the line of scrimmage:

Now defenses are being forced to choose between leaving Cooper one-on-one against a cornerback, or opening up more running room for Elliott.

That’s made the Cowboys offense smooth and efficient. They haven’t turned the ball over since Week 9, and Dak Prescott has completed over two-thirds of his passes in four straight games. He didn’t accomplish that once in the seven games the Cowboys played without Cooper.

Prescott was saddled by a subpar receiving corps that wasn’t finding production out of anyone but slot receiver Cole Beasley. Now, receivers like Allen Hurns and Michael Gallup can settle into more appropriate roles as complementary receivers rather than featured ones.

The Cowboys are at their best when they’re feeding Elliott, and Prescott is doing enough to move the chains. As long as they’re dominating time of possession, the Cowboys are in good shape. Cooper has helped them lean into that identity.

There are two ways to evaluate the value of the Cowboys’ trade for Cooper:

It’s hard to give the Cowboys a good grade on the first question. While he’s been a superb addition, Cooper came to Dallas:

His original draft position and exciting rookie year suggested he could be worth a first-round pick. Not much else did.

It meant the Cowboys were criticized by many for the deal, and it made other trades around the NFL more difficult to broker:

A silver lining is that the Cowboys were below .500 at the time of the trade — meaning there was a chance they gave up a top-10 pick for Cooper. Now, Dallas is in good shape to earn a postseason berth and guarantee that pick will be outside the top 20.

If the Cowboys gave up too much for Cooper when he was really worth — say — a second-round pick and change, it can’t be undone. What can be evaluated now is whether or not Cooper has performed like a player worth the trade.

With games against the Saints, Eagles, and Colts in the next three weeks, we’ll see if Cooper has changed the Cowboys offense enough to make it an actual playoff contender. So far, the only win Dallas has against a team with a winning record was its Thanksgiving victory over Washington.

But it sure looks like Cooper is every bit the game changer the Cowboys hoped he’d be when they made the trade.