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Cooper Kupp caps incredible season with Super Bowl MVP honors

jack baer
Staff writer
·2 min read
59

Add one more chapter to Cooper Kupp's season for the ages.

After a league-leading regular season campaign that saw him earn NFL Offensive Player of the Year honors, the Los Angeles Rams wide receiver won Super Bowl LVI MVP honors after basically carrying his team to the 23-20 win on their final drive against the Cincinnati Bengals.

Kupp finished with eight catches for 92 yards and two touchdowns on 10 targets, plus a rush for a key fourth-down conversion to keep the Rams in the game late in the fourth quarter. His last catch was his biggest, a 1-yard touchdown grab to give Los Angeles the lead for good.

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On that final drive, Kupp caught four balls for 39 yards and the touchdown. The Rams targeted him on four of their final five plays, with penalties wiping out a would-be touchdown and two incompletions.

BetMGM had Kupp at +600 odds for the Super Bowl MVP entering Sunday. Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow was the most popular pick, with 17 percent of bettors and 23 percent of money on his +225 odds.

Cooper Kupp is your Super Bowl MVP. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Cooper Kupp is your Super Bowl MVP. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

A season for the ages for Cooper Kupp

Kupp was the Rams' offensive MVP all season, and to one voter, the NFL MVP as well. His 145 receptions, 1,947 receiving yards and 16 receiving touchdowns all led the NFL, the latter two by a significant margin.

That production continued throughout the playoffs. Kupp finished the postseason with an NFL-record 33 receptions, delivering for the Rams in the biggest moments no matter who was covering him.

Already considered a dangerous weapon as a slot receiver going into this season, Kupp's game took a massive step forward with the arrival of quarterback Matthew Stafford. With Stafford's propensity for throwing deep, Kupp evolved into an all-field threat, who even terrorized teams as a run blocker when he wasn't running routes.

For all that has been made about the Rams' star-heavy roster, Kupp is entirely a homegrown success story. The Rams selected him in the third round of the 2017 draft after a career at Eastern Washington that saw him leave school as the NCAA's all-time leading receiver with 6,464 yards in four years.