Amari Cooper: A Disappearing Act?
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.
