Even from an early age, his drive appeared extraordinary. As a toddler, his family marveled at how he could focus on a single task for hours. At 5 years old, his grandfather remembers watching in awe during a YMCA basketball game. Kupp’s team won, 41-2, and while other players lost interest, Kupp was locked in. “Cooper scored 39 of the 41 points,” Jake says, chuckling. In junior high, when he was moved up to a better AAU basketball team, Kupp found himself riding the bench behind bigger, more developed players. He locked in again.
“He came home and worked — shooting, dribbling — every night until the sun went down,” Craig recalls. When it came to football, though, that drive only seemed to take him so far. The two generations of Kupp men before him made it to the NFL. A future following in their footsteps became his dream. “I knew that’s what I was meant to do,” he says. But one look at him then suggested that was unlikely. As a freshman at Davis High, he weighed no more than 115 pounds.
Still, he was determined. He convinced himself to push harder, that any misstep might derail his mission. “I was already behind,” Kupp says. “Any mistake I made, with my size, it felt like I had no chance.”
His father tried to sell college coaches on his passion, his work ethic, his football IQ, but it was no use. He was too small. Even as he grew to 170 pounds as a senior, colleges overlooked him. He left the field after his final high school game without a single scholarship offer — a feeling, Kupp says, he wouldn’t wish on anyone.
Beau Baldwin had been watching from afar, familiar with Kupp from summer football camps. When Idaho State swooped in with a late, full scholarship, the Eastern Washington coach did, too. It was a decision he’d look back on as one of the best of his tenure.
Kupp redshirted as a freshman, but from there, the undersized wideout became a colossal presence wherever he went. He broke nearly every FCS receiving record, smashing Jerry Rice’s previously unmatched stats. When Eastern Washington played Pac-12 or Mountain West teams, coaches would often marvel to Baldwin after: How could they have overlooked this guy?
Kupp was determined to never let that happen again. He spent long nights in the Eastern Washington film room, learning every detail of the offense. When he got engaged and his soon-to-be wife, Anna, moved to campus, he would bring her along while he studied film. He rarely spent time elsewhere.
“Sometimes, we had to remind him to be more human,” Baldwin, now Cal’s offensive coordinator, says. “But he was just driven that way. He would say, ‘There’s just not enough time to do anything else.’ ”
