Alabama's Amari Cooper Emerging as 2015 NFL Draft's Top Wide Receiver Prospect

After a disappointing sophomore season cast some doubt, Alabama’s Amari Cooper is proving early in his junior season that he is one of college football’s best wide receivers and a top prospect among players eligible for the 2015 NFL draft.

It’s been clear since Cooper’s true freshman year in 2012, when he had 59 receptions for precisely 1,000 yards and 11 touchdowns, that the wideout was a special talent.

In his second season for the Crimson Tide, Cooper failed to take the next step to stardom. As he battled drops and a nagging foot injury, Cooper never topped five catches and 75 yards in the first 10 games of his sophomore year, and he finished the season with just 45 receptions for 736 yards and four touchdowns.

He’s already made up for last year’s letdown with a remarkable start to this season.

Cooper has nearly matched his 12-game production from last season in just four contests this year; his 43 catches and 655 receiving yards both lead the Football Bowl Subdivision, while he has already topped his touchdown total from last year with five scores.

Dating back to the last two games of his sophomore campaign, when he finally started to get his groove back in Alabama’s losing efforts to Auburn and Oklahoma, Cooper will go into the second month of the college football season on a run of six straight performances in which he has accumulated at least 121 receiving yards.

Those numbers are neither fluke nor simply the product of a well-oiled offensive system. Cooper’s on-field play clearly demonstrates that he is making his greatness happen with his own tools.

Those tools should enable Cooper, a junior who will be draft-eligible after this season, to continue to be highly productive in the NFL.

Tools for Greatness on Display

It’s not a surprise that Cooper has played exceptionally this year. He faced high expectations coming into the season as he was already ranked as the top prospect at his position by many draft analysts, including ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr. and Todd McShay (both subscription required).

That said, it remained important for Cooper to prove he could perform at a consistently high level.

So far this season, he’s doing exactly that.

Cooper possesses many qualities that should attract scouts to him as a potential high first-round draft pick.

Not the least of those qualities is Cooper’s big-play ability. He’s already had plenty of flashy, exciting moments in his career, but perhaps his most memorable (although Auburn cornerback Chris Davis ultimately ensured that it wasn’t the biggest play of the day) was his 99-yard catch-and-run touchdown in last year’s Iron Bowl.

A natural runner who glides to the football, Cooper can take a well-thrown deep ball to paydirt. He excels at adjusting his stride to track the ball downfield, has the speed to run away from a defensive back like he left Auburn’s Jonathon Mincy in the dust on that play and he possesses the balance to run through contact.

Another dangerous trait of Cooper’s is his lateral quickness. He doesn’t have to rely on his ability to beat a defender downfield to make a big play; as the following example from last season’s Orange Bowl versus Oklahoma demonstrates, even a screen pass can turn into a huge gain once the ball is in Cooper’s hands.

Cooper regularly extends plays by making defenders miss with his sharp cuts. His quickness also extends to route-running, which might be the most spectacular aspect of his game.

There will be receivers in the 2015 draft with faster 40-yard dash times and longer arms, but there’s unlikely to be anyone who gets open as fluently as Cooper does.

The key to running great routes is to waste as little motion as possible. Cooper makes crisp breaks that force defensive backs to react immediately or get burned.

The following 11-yard catch against West Virginia from this year’s Alabama season opener was a textbook display of route-running 101 by Cooper. After beating a jam off the line of scrimmage with a fluid double move, Cooper made a clean turn toward the middle of the field to separate from WVU cornerback Daryl Worley.

While Cooper had some issues with catch consistency in 2013, he’s had no such problems this season. Typically, the Crimson Tide star has been able to pluck the ball out of the air and secure it in his hands, even on plays like the following example from last year’s Auburn game, in which he had to make an adjustment back to an underthrown ball.

Cooper has the downfield receiving capabilities on the outside that a No. 1 NFL receiver is expected to have, but it’s really at the intermediate level of the field where he does his best work. With 27 plays from scrimmage of 10 yards or more already this season—the most of any player in the FBS, according to CFBStats.com—Cooper is making it clear that he can make the chains move.

Red-zone skills won’t be a selling point for Cooper, but he’s also proven that he’s a competitive receiver who doesn’t back down from physical opposition.

One of the best one-on-one wins of his career came in last week’s Alabama win over Florida—a game in which Cooper accumulated career-high totals of 201 receiving yards and three touchdowns—when the wideout made a four-yard catch in the end zone over one of the most talented cornerbacks in the nation, Florida’s Vernon Hargreaves III.

How High Could Cooper Be Selected?

In the most recent NFL draft this May, Clemson wide receiver Sammy Watkins was so highly regarded that the Buffalo Bills traded their first- and fourth-round picks for the 2015 draft to move up just five spots, to No. 4 overall from No. 9, to select him.

Their decision to make that move, in a draft that ended up having five wideouts go in Round 1 and 15 off the board in the top 100, made it clear that Watkins was viewed as an elite talent.

Even with regard to how highly Watkins was valued, NFL Media’s Daniel Jeremiah believes that Cooper might be an even better prospect.

“I think he's a better football player just all-around, just polished in everything, as a route runner, I think he's a little bit ahead of Sammy,” Jeremiah recently said on the College Football 24/7 podcast, according to NFL.com’s Chase Goodbread.

Jeremiah isn’t the only one with glowing praise for Cooper. A talent evaluator for an AFC team, who also compared Cooper to Watkins, told Yahoo! Sports’ Eric Edholm earlier this week that he views Cooper as a top-10 level talent.

Pro Football Hall of Fame wide receiver and current ESPN NFL analyst Cris Carter also recently praised Cooper on ESPN’s Mike & Mike, according to Charles Power of BamaOnLine:

"

I don't know what he's going to do in the pros, but since Ozzie Newsome, Alabama has the best wide receiver that they have had in the history of their school and his name is Amari Cooper. He is a true junior from Miami and he is fabulous. His ability to run routes- I met Amari when he was in high school at a football clinic and he's probably the most advanced wide receiver that I have seen at a young age since Randy Moss.

"

Not everyone, however, believes that Cooper is a rare talent. Ryan McCrystal, the founder of DraftAce.com and a Bleacher Report contributor, sees Cooper as a complementary player rather than a star of an NFL offense.

McCrystal presents a valid point. Listed at 6’1” and 210 pounds by Alabama’s official athletics website, Cooper will not have a universal size advantage over cornerbacks at the next level. And while he runs well with the ball in his hands, there are likely to be other receivers in the first-round mix who run faster 40-yard dash times.

Compare Cooper to Watkins, however, and there’s reason to believe Cooper might also end up a top-five draft pick.

Cooper’s official measurables aren’t likely to be far off from those of Watkins, who measured in at 6’1” and 211 pounds and ran a 4.43-second 40-yard dash at the 2014 NFL Scouting Combine, according to NFL.com.

Watkins was neither the biggest nor the fastest receiver drafted in Round 1, but he was the most complete. How Cooper’s speed compares to Watkins is to be determined, but he displays similar open-field playmaking skills and route-running ability.

If there is one real weakness in Cooper’s game, it’s his blocking. Cooper’s game tape regularly shows him whiffing chances to pick up defenders, such as the example below, while he lacks the strength to generate significant movement even when he does get his hands on a potential tackler.

While blocking is a capacity that Cooper’s NFL team will expect him to improve in, it’s probably not a shortcoming that will make a team pass on him.

Cooper could decide to delay the NFL until 2016 and return for his senior season at Alabama, but that would come as a surprise.

So long as Cooper continues to catch the ball consistently and avoids the pitfalls of his 2013 season, he’s a good bet to be a top-10 overall selection.

All GIFs were made at gfycat.com using videos from DraftBreakdown.com. All statistics courtesy of Alabama’s official athletics website unless otherwise noted.

Dan Hope is an NFL/NFL Draft Featured Columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow @Dan_Hope