Amari Cooper: A Disappearing Act?
By: Michael Todisco
Tags: NFL, Sports Analytics, Sports, Data Visualization, Data Science

A few weeks ago on ESPN’s morning show “Get Up”, the often outspoken Rex Ryan, commented on the Cowboys signing Amari Cooper to a 5 year $100 million contract. Needless to say, he was not in favor of it.

“To me, this is biggest disappearing act in the National Football League,” Ryan said of Cooper. “He doesn’t show up on the road, he doesn’t show up — when the competition’s good, when he’s up against the top corners, that guy disappears.”

Rex went on to call Cooper a “turd”, which was particularly headline grabbing.

While I think most football fans would agree “turd” is a disrespectful exaggeration of Cooper, I wanted to dive deeper into Cooper’s performance and see if Rex had a point. In order to conduct such an analysis, I used data from the nflscrapR repository and focused on expected yards added as the main metric to judge performance. Here are some of the comparisons that I looked to quantify:

Beginning vs end of the Season

Home vs road

Early in games vs late in games

vs top cornerbacks

The code for this analysis can be found in this Jupyter Notebook.

Monthly Performance

The below graph plots average Expected Points Added (EPA) per game by month.

Monthly EPA per Game

There is a pretty obvious decline as the season move along. Cooper puts up big numbers in September and October, but his EPA per game decreases as we get closer to the playoffs. And December has been his worse month (for both Dallas and Oakland), posting negative EPA.

Home vs Road Performance

The boxplots below shows each games EPA broken out by wether or not Cooper was playing at home or on the road.

Home vs Road EPA per game

Medians and quantiles are higher for both teams when Amari is playing at home. The difference is especially apparent for Cooper’s games with the Cowboys.

Performance by Qtr

The boxplots below show each games EPA by quarter.

EPA per quarter

EPA in quarters 1–3 for Cooper are typically above 0. The 4th quarter tells a much different story, showing a negative median EPA.

The heatmap below further drills this point home. Amari by far performs the worst in the 4th quarter of road games.

Vs Top Cornerbacks

I looked at the corners on this list from Bleacher Report in order to analyze Cooper’s success (or lack thereof) against the best corners in the league. Cooper has played against 7 of the 10 corners on that list — Marcus Peters, AJ Bouye, Casey Hayward, Marshon Lattimore, Darius Slay, Aqib Talib, Tre’Davious White. This approach is obviously a bit subjective and the sample size is small, but I think most fans would agree that these corners are at the very least above average.

When playing against these corners Cooper actually averages a negative EPA -0.74. And what is glaring is that this average shoots up to 2.30 EPA when he isn’t playing against those corners.

Conclusion

So maybe Rex has a point. This analysis would certainly back him up.

Cooper performs worse late in the season (when winning games becomes more critical)

Cooper performs worse on the road than at home

Cooper performs worse late in games

Cooper performs worse against the leagues best cornerbacks

All of these factors do not indicate that the Cowboys made a good decision paying Cooper and committing to him long-term. However, it’s easy to forget that Cooper is only 25 years old. It feels as though he’s been in the league forever, but he has a ton of football left to play and he has the opportunity to significantly grow as a receiver. Cooper immediately impacted the Cowboys offense when they traded for him and he is a huge reason why they were the #1 rated offense in the league last year. So there is no way he is a “turd”. And yet it’s apparent that he needs to show up in clutch moments and not just put up stats against bad teams when the game isn’t on the line. I’m still very hopeful that he will be able to deliver.