Oakland Raiders receiver Amari Cooper has dropped five passes in the team’s first three games. Head coach Jack Del Rio has made it clear that this needs to change.
Del Rio on Cooper drops: "I can't speak for him. Obviously, he's a dynamic player for us…We've got to find a way for that to be rectified"
— Michael Gehlken (@GehlkenNFL) September 25, 2017
The drops have contributed to an overall sluggish start for Cooper.
The third-year receiver has caught 10 passes for 101 yards over the first three games of the season. As a point of comparison, he caught six passes for 137 yards in the first game of the 2016 season alone. Overall, he hauled in 15 passes for 270 yards during the first three weeks of last season.
Making matters worse is that Cooper’s reception and yardage numbers have steadily decreased over the first three weeks of the 2017 season. In Week 3 against the Washington Redskins, he caught only one pass for six yards.
Certainly, finding a way to catch the balls that he gets a hand on will go a long way towards bringing those numbers up to what we’ve seen in the past.