Now that the NFL Scouting Combine has come and gone, draft season is full steam ahead. Over the back half of the college football season, and especially into the offseason, one of the biggest risers in mock drafts has been Omar Cooper Jr. At this point, he even seems likely to hear his name called in the first round.
Today, we answer whether this hype is warranted and how Cooper projects as a dynasty asset. As always, I’ll be primarily focusing on how he wins in areas that are relevant for fantasy football.
Fantasy-Relevant Traits
Intermediate Usage
Omar Cooper Jr’s intermediate usage actually changed dramatically over the back half of the 2025-26 college football season.
Early on, Cooper was balancing usage outside and in the slot. In both cases, he was running an extremely translatable route tree, featuring in-breaking and out-breaking routes designed for Mendoza to throw him open with timing.
I thought Cooper really excelled here. He’s very nuanced in terms of hiding his intentions until he’s reached the top of his stem, and then he's very sudden and crisp when making his break. This usually creates a couple of steps of separation, more than enough for an NFL QB to find him for an easy completion. No, Cooper isn’t as explosive as some of the very best receivers in the league, but he’s very effective and shows a high floor by being able to win in these situations.
Later in the season, I suspect due to the emergence of Charlie Becker, Indiana moved Cooper into the slot nearly full-time, and the offense featured a lot more spread-out looks. While you can’t blame Indiana for calling an offense that eventually won a national championship, this change exposed some of the weaker parts of Cooper’s game.
Starting in Week 11 or so, Cooper’s route tree became much, much more vertical. Unfortunately, Cooper’s vertical speed is just average, fast 40 time notwithstanding, and corners didn’t give him enough cushion to give him easy looks underneath. He also just earned fewer targets when his job was to run clear-out routes or to stretch the seam. It’s just not his game.
In the NFL, look for Cooper to run a more balanced route tree, and for him to resume winning in the intermediate parts of the field.
Short Usage
Cooper has very reliable hands, and he has a couple of reps on film where he holds on to the football despite taking a massive hit. He’s just fast enough to maintain a cushion on shallow crossers, and he’s very dangerous when he gets out into the flat.
With a bit of a thinner frame, Cooper’s leverage and ability to box out aren’t as reliable as Elijah Sarratt or Denzel Boston, but his zone beating does play up because he’s a hands-catcher with good fundamentals and toughness.
Many of Cooper’s best run-after-catch reps occur organically on short routes, but more on that in a moment.
Run After Catch
Cooper’s run-after-catch production came from two main areas, namely short downfield routes and bubble screens. I thought the bubble screens were mediocre. On the one hand, Cooper has good vision and quickness to find a crease. However, if the blocking wasn’t very good, he didn’t have the stop-start ability or pure athleticism to create something.
However, when the run-after-catch opportunity comes to him organically after catching a short pass, Cooper is extremely dangerous. He’s a tough and gritty runner who manages to stay upright after absorbing contact, and his speed does play up with the ball in his hands.
Overall, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend an NFL team design run-after-catch opportunities for Cooper. Rather, they’re better off letting it come to him as part of his receiving production. I do believe in him to remain a strong run-after-catch producer in the NFL, just without the consistency of a designed target floor.
Deep Usage
While I see the occasional rep of Cooper winning behind the defense, overall I would classify deep usage as a weakness in his game. With low 4.4 speed, Cooper is plenty fast, but his burst and explosiveness don’t play up on vertical routes, and defensive backs can carry him deep.
To be fair, Cooper did have to deal with a lot of missed holding calls, so it’s possible he lost those chances to burn a safety deep. We might be having a different conversation once referees start calling this in the NFL.
Even when he wins, because he’s neither the biggest nor the fastest player, the quarterback has a small margin of error to hit him deep. Consider somebody like Carnell Tate. Even when the quarterback underthrows Tate, he’s too physically overwhelming for the defensive back to lunge and make a desperate play for the ball.
In Cooper’s case, he doesn’t quite have the final gear to leave the cornerback in the dust, and he doens’t have quite the size, physicality, and catch radius to erase minor mistakes. For this reason, there were quite a few missed connections with Mendoza on his tape.
Traits That Matter for Earning a Role
Hands
This is one of the strengths of Cooper’s game. He’s not perfect, but he holds on to the ball through contact, and he can make acrobatic catches to help out his quarterback, including with one of the catches of the year against Penn State.
Blocking
While Cooper isn’t the strongest player, Indiana did trust him a telling amount. He has reps on tape where Indiana motions him into the scrum and asks him to seal a defender. In these cases, I’d say he managed to lose slowly enough for his running back to get through the hole, even if he didn’t outright win the rep.
There are even some reps of Cooper lead blocking, which I wouldn’t exactly recommend at the next level, but it’s cool that Indiana trusted him to do it. The effort is there, and he can be just good enough to stay on the field full-time.
Overall
Here are my current tiers among the players for whom I’ve actually gotten All-22 tape. Others will join these rankings over the coming weeks.
Overall, Omar Cooper Jr. should hear his name called towards the end of the first round. Between his nuances in the intermediate areas and his great hands, he feels like a safe, high-quality WR2 on a strong receiver tandem.
It’s not entirely clear to me whether Cooper would get exposed or flourish if he were forced into a WR1 role, but I think highly enough of him that it’s in his range of outcomes to emerge as a star player.
For fantasy purposes, Cooper feels like a quality WR2. Between his ability to make chunk receptions in the intermediate areas of the field, his run-after-catch, and his nose for the endzone, he has a lot of avenues to scoring fantasy points. However, I don’t quite think his skill or movement ability is in that elite tier where he can be a target hog every single game.
For dynasty drafts, assuming late first-round draft capital, he’s in the mix after the consensus top-5 players are off the board, mainly depending on where the RB2 of the class is drafted and where the other receivers around his tier are drafted.