How a 2015 meeting played into Bills’ acquisition of WR Amari Cooper

A meeting that occurred roughly a decade ago played a significant role in the Buffalo Bills' recent acquisition of wide receiver Amari Cooper.

Kyle Silagyi | 2 Hours Ago

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You only get one chance to make a first impression, and the initial impact that wide receiver Amari Cooper made on Buffalo Bills general manager Brandon Beane was memorable to the point that it motivated the executive to make a significant trade nearly a decade later.

The two had never been part of the same organization prior to Buffalo’s Tuesday acquisition of the five-time Pro Bowler, but they first interacted with each other some 10 years ago in the leadup to the 2015 NFL Draft. Beane, then the assistant general manager of the Carolina Panthers, traveled to Tuscaloosa, AL to meet Cooper, a then-dominant Alabama pass-catcher who was projected to be one of the first selections in that year’s draft.

Coming off a 2014 campaign in which Carolina won a playoff game despite finishing the regular season with a sub-.500 record, Beane knew he wouldn’t have a realistic opportunity to bring the Fred Biletnikoff Award winner to Charlotte; he left the meeting wishing that wasn’t the case.

“He’s a guy I’ve always admired from afar,” Beane said during a Wednesday appearance on The Pat McAfee Show. “When I was in Carolina and he came out in 2015, I actually went out to Alabama with Ricky Proehl, our receivers coach. Amari was not going to work out, we were not picking as high as he got picked, but you always want to do your due diligence. We spent probably two hours watching film with him, took him out to dinner, and really got a feel for his love of ball, his understanding of football. Super football smart, passionate, we opened some of his practice film at Bama and he broke it down for us.

“I left there going, ‘Man, this guy would be a great addition.’ Obviously the Raiders took him, I think No. 3 or No. 4 overall that year, so really just been watching his career from afar. You never know when an opportunity is going to strike like this.”

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Beane further raved about that 2015 meeting during a Tuesday press conference, reiterating just how impressed he was with Cooper to the Buffalo press.

“We went to dinner, and Ricky and I got back in the truck, and we were like, ‘Man, he didn’t like us,’” Beane said. “That’s just who he is; he’s just very quiet, very reserved. The restaurant was a little bit loud. The next day though, we pulled into Alabama’s football offices, and there was a little gate. Sometimes you get here and you show up to work [prospects] out, and the kids aren’t there yet, they didn’t tell you the right place to go on these big college campuses. Well, we pull right where he told us, and he waited right over there, he had something to open the gate for us. Told us right where to park. I was like, ‘This guy’s a pro.’

“We walk in, and we were talking at dinner the night before about some of the routes that he had run in practice but had not run in games, and we were like, ‘Can we see you run those routes?’ And so he had all his practice stuff, he beat us in there, had the film uploaded. We walk into one of their meeting rooms, and you give this guy the clicker, and he was, like, at peace. Talking to us like a coach. ‘This is what I was doing here, this is what he’s got, this is what he’s got, this is why I did this.’ . . . I was like, ‘Man, I’m sold.’ We just didn’t have the fourth pick in the draft that year.”

Cooper and Beane’s respective careers diverged on their own equally fruitful paths from that meeting; Cooper would be selected by the Raiders with the fourth overall pick and would ultimately establish himself as one of the league’s most consistently productive wideouts while Beane would be hired by the Bills in 2017, since constructing a perennially competitive roster headlined by one of the league’s best quarterbacks in Josh Allen. With Cooper having less than a year remaining on his contract and Beane in need of a marquee pass-catcher to pair with Allen, the time was now right for their paths to cross again, their initial meeting roughly a decade ago—and the strong impression Cooper made on the executive—playing a significant role in the transaction.

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