Rams’ Cooper Kupp eager to climb onto NFL’s big stage

LOS ANGELES — It sometimes gets lost in the brilliance of the defensive game plan Bill Belichick put together to help the Patriots beat the Rams 13-3 in Super Bowl LIII three years ago.

The way they put the clamps on Jared Goff and erased Todd Gurley and held a team that averaged 32.9 points that season to a single field goal, it’s easy to just tip a cap to Belichick for drawing up such a stifling plan.

But it’s worth remembering that Gurley was never the same player after suffering a knee injury six weeks before and that one of the Rams’ most consistent weapons didn’t see the field that day in Atlanta.

That’s why Rams wide receiver Cooper Kupp is especially fired up about playing in Super Bowl LVI on Sunday against the Bengals at SoFi Stadium. Kupp, now in his fifth year and coming off an MVP-caliber season in which he had 145 catches for 1,947 yards and 16 touchdowns, suffered a season-ending knee injury in 2018 when he tore his ACL in early November.

For the next 12 weeks, including the Rams’ run to the Super Bowl, he could offer his team just moral support rather than the consistent production he provided from the moment he arrived in Los Angeles from Eastern Washington the year before. Kupp was on his way to eclipsing 80 catches and 1,000 yards before the injury and was the perfect complement to fellow wide receivers Robert Woods and Brandin Cooks in the Rams’ high-octane attack.

Even for the deeply grounded Kupp, being reduced to spectator rather than contributor took an emotional toll.

“Missing that Super Bowl, that’s one of the hardest things I’ve been through,” he said. “The conflict it creates in you when you are both cheering and pulling for your guys, but you know that every step of the way, every time they do succeed, it just hurts you that much more. … There’s just that conflict within you that’s both equally wanting them to succeed and do it but also wanting to be there and knowing that you can’t be a part of it.”

In spite of being underestimated at almost every point of his athletic life — he was an overlooked high school recruit who ended up at Eastern Washington, then tumbled all the way to the third round of the 2017 draft because of a pedestrian 40-time at the Scouting Combine — Kupp has continually out-performed his doubters through a combination of work ethic and, frankly, an elite, if not underappreciated athletic skill set.

The 2018 injury was just another way for him to plug back into the work and study habits that have always defined him.

“At no point was there any doubt in my mind that I was gonna come back and be better than I was before,” Kupp said. “I felt like I had been given an opportunity now to rebuild myself exactly how I wanted to. I could teach myself to run the way that I wanted to run. I could run routes the way I wanted to run routes, I could cut the way that I wanted to cut, eliminate any bad habits and be able to move into a place where all that stuff is as efficiently and dialed in as I possibly make it.”

And now he is back in the Super Bowl.

This time as a participant rather than a spectator.

Contact Vincent Bonsignore at vbonsignore@reviewjournal.com. Follow @VinnyBonsignore on Twitter.