Raiders wide receiver Amari Cooper has put up good numbers since entering the league as a first round pick in 2015 and his quarterback is letting the players tasked with defending him this year know that they should be prepared for an even more aggressive Cooper this time around.
Cooper has gotten bigger this offseason and Derek Carr said the duo is working on hitting more passes downfield in order to take advantage of his ability to win one-on-one battles for the ball.
“That thing that you saw at Alabama where he’ll just take things over, and not to say that he hasn’t because he has, but I just think that it’s not just becoming a thing of what game it’s going to be, it’s becoming a thing where that’s who he is,” Carr said, via NBC Sports Bay Area. “DBs better know that he’s really taking it serious that he’s trying to go attack them this year. He’s not going to let them come to him anymore, and I think that just comes with age and seeing him do it out here. The guy has been going off all camp, all offseason. We were kind of just laughing at how impressed we were.”
Cooper has had trouble with drops at points over the last two years and he slowed down in the second half of last season, but he’s only turning 23 this month and that’s a good reason to believe that he should be able to continue to find new facets to his game in 2017 and beyond. That would be good news for the Raiders and an even tougher time for the teams trying to stop them.