Rams wide receiver Cooper Kupp has been the team’s best offensive player so far this season, a remarkable accomplishment considering he’s still less than a year removed from a torn ACL.
Kupp, who is second in the NFL with 388 receiving yards, used his rehab not only to repair the torn ligament, but to become a better runner. Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times reports that Kupp spent his down time studying running form and making himself a more efficient runner, and he’s now faster than he was before the injury.
“It’s a little crazy,” said Dr. Neal ElAttrache, who performed the ACL reconstruction. “We’ve never had this GPS data until the last few years, but I can tell you that’s typically not the way it goes the first year back. He’s surprising everybody.”
Everybody but himself, that is. Kupp expects nothing less from himself.
“When I started writing down my goals, I wanted to be as outlandish as possible,” he said. “I wanted to make sure before I went to bed that I’d see my list of goals and feel good when I put my head on the pillow that what I’d done that day was pointing toward achieving those things. I set them outrageously high because I wanted to have an outrageous work ethic about how I went about my day.”
That work ethic is paying off for Kupp and the Rams.
