Go out on top, as champion? That’s not Cooper Kupp. He, Seahawks have more work
Cooper Kupp could have gone out in a way very few in professional sports get to.
Unequivocably on top. The best in the world.
One game after his NFC title-game touchdown helped launch his Seahawks into the Super Bowl, Kupp caught a game-high six passes on a game-high 12 targets as Seattle dominated New England to win Super Bowl 60 Feb. 8. It was the second NFL championship for the veteran wide receiver.
He’d just finished his ninth pro season. The native of Yakima is 32. Thanks to the Seahawks signing him last spring he, his wife Anna — whom he met at a track meet in 2012 when Kupp was attending Yakima’s Davis High School and she was at Richland High — were back living in their home state. They are back home with their sons Cooper, Cyprus and Solas, near their extended families.
Kupp has earned more than $116 million since the Los Angeles Rams drafted him out of Eastern Washington. He’s been the Super Bowl MVP. He’s been the NFL offensive player of the year.
And when he beat L.A. in the NFC title game with that touchdown, when he and the Seahawks beat the Patriots to win the Super Bowl four months ago, Kupp proved to the Rams who’d released him before the 2025 season that he was not, in fact, done.
So did he think about retiring, about leaving on top to go home to Anna and the boys to hang out with their grandmas and grandpas?
“Oh, no. Never for a second,” Kupp said Thursday, shaking his head.
He was back in his blue number-10 Seahawks practice jersey. He’d just come off the field after fully participating in another voluntary offseason practice three months before his 10th NFL season begins.
“I’m lovin’ playing this game too much,” he said. “I just...I love playing football. And so, I’m enjoying it.
“So, no, there was never a thought.”
Besides, Kupp has a blast at his job. He sees no reason to quit it.
“This is a fun place to come to work,” he said inside the Seahawks’ Virginia Mason Athletic Center, where coach Mike Macdonald has created a unique culture of brotherhood and trust in two years.
“We’ve got a lot of really good people here. You come to work, and if you want to be about the right stuff, you’re going to be around a lot of the right people here.
“It’s not like that everywhere.
“I’ve heard — I’ve only been two places— but I’ve heard horror stories. Thankfully, never had to live in those places. But there’s a few places I know that around the league that are unique in that way.
“I think we’ve got an uncommon thing here.”
Cooper Kupp reflects
Even with two Super Bowl rings now, Kupp isn’t satisfied.
He didn’t say this Thursday, but he still has some proving to do. His 2025 season, a roaring team success, was subpar by his personal standards.
Kupp was the NFL offensive player of the year with 145 catches and 16 touchdowns four seasons ago with the Rams. That 2021 season he became the second player in the Super Bowl era (since 1967) with at least 1,000 yards receiving and 10 touchdowns in the first nine games of a season.
The only other player to achieve that: Jerry Rice.
Then last season, the first of his three-year, $45 million deal with the Seahawks, Kupp watched Jaxon Smith-Njigba become the 2021 Cooper Kupp. Smith-Njigba led the NFL with 1,793 receiving yards. He was an All-Pro for the first time. He was the league’s offensive player of the year.
Smith-Njigba had 119 catches in the regular season, on 163 targets. He had 10 touchdown catches. His 35.8% of all targets on passes by Seattle’s quarterbacks, almost all by Sam Darnold, were the most in the NFL.
Kupp had just 47 receptions and two scores in his first Seahawks regular season. He had just 70 targets. The catches and targets were each the second-fewest of his career, second only to his 2018 season when he played in only eight games for the Rams and went on injured reserve. Kupp had just 16.2% of Seattle’s passing targets. That was 58th in the league, per Sumer Sports.
Yet his teammates and coaches say Kupp is much more valuable to these Seahawks, the locker room and their championship culture than number can portray.
“(He) just understands the game at a different level,” Darnold said.
““He’s another example that you can show to players: ‘Look, this is how you do it,’” Macdonald said. “He — as a player, as a person — I can’t say enough great things about ‘Coop.’
“I’m so happy he’s here. I’m so happy to have him as a Seahawk. He’s a force multiplier...just in terms of our attitude and how you just approach our business every day.”
Kupp now looks back at his 2025 homecoming season with the team he grew up rooting for from Yakima with appreciation of how difficult the process was to winning the Super Bowl again.
“It was a really cool journey. Incredible,” he said Thursday. “Looking back on and all the highs and lows and things like that.
“All that being said, it’s just great being here now, being here with the guys, understanding that there’s a relationship.
“There is a lot of continuity going into this year. A lot of built trust, and camaraderie that has carried in(to) this year.”
He was speaking in the indoor practice facility. Recently, the buildings staffers hung on the east wall of it the Seahawks’ second Super Bowl championship banner, next to the one from the 2013 season.
Kupp looks up to that banner and sees that continuity; 49 of the 53 players on the active roster are returning for the 2026 season.
Kupp also sees in that Super Bowl banner the work it took to get back to the top. And the appreciation for the work it will take the next months to get back there again.
“There’s moments of reflection, right? There’s moments of understanding, of each of the (division and conference and NFL) banners that are up here there’s a story and a lot of blood, sweat and tears behind each of them,” Kupp said. “There is a respect of what went into those things and what those stand for, and the hardships that were overcome at each of those things.
“(There’s also) a period at the end that says ‘Now what?’
“Now you’re in it (again). You’re moving forward, and there’s an opportunity to be a part of another one. To experience what it’s like to go and chase after something really special.”
What’s Kupp remember after the 2022 Rams defending their Super Bowl title he won with them?
That year’s Rams dropped to 5-12 amid myriad injuries — including to Kupp. He only played in nine games that season. He says today’s Seahawks are already far ahead of those Rams who fell hard after winning it all.
“Back in ‘22, the injuries and things that were going on, we weren’t able (to practice),” Kupp said. “We’re out here (now), we’ve been out here for the max allotment of time for OTAs and competing the whole time, you know? And we weren’t even capable of doing that in 2022 in L.A. because there were just too many injuries. We couldn’t do it.
“So it’s very different. ...What’s been great is just being able to come back here and guys are healthy, guys are competing. It’s been some really good work. Moving forward. And being able to chase something special here.”
Here comes ‘Hard Knocks’
Something else Kupp has experience with from his Rams days that will be new for the Seahawks this year?
He’s been on “Hard Knocks.” Twice.
Kupp’s 2016 Rams were the featured team for the HBO/NFL Films series for training camp that year. They co-starred again on Hard Knocks in 2020 with the Chargers, their co-tenants at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood just outside Los Angeles.
What does Kupp think about the 2026 Seahawks being the first defending Super Bowl champions featured on Hard Knocks in 25 years, since the first edition had the champ Baltimore Ravens on it in 2001?
“It’s great. It’s great,” Kupp said.
“It’s going to suck.”
He smiled.
“It will be good,” he said, unconvincingly. “I’ve done it before, and it’s honestly, you kind of dread it because you’re like, ‘Gosh, dang, cameras being everywhere!’ (It) is challenging. But it does kind of just fade into the background, eventually.
He said he’s joked to wide receivers coach Frisman Jackson that he’s going to put him on the spot when those NFL Films Hard Knocks cameras are rolling through Seahawks meetings in July and August.
“I’ve told ‘Fris’ I’m groing to ask him some really challenging questions every time he walks in the room as soon as the cameras are on.
“Put him in uncomfortable situations. We’ll see how he handles it.”
This story was originally published June 4, 2026 at 5:29 PM with the headline "Go out on top, as champion? That’s not Cooper Kupp. He, Seahawks have more work."
