Amari Cooper, traded three times: the price of a wide receiver, falling

A first-round pick.

A fifth-rounder and a swap of sixths.

A third-rounder and a conditional seventh, for half a season of a 30-year-old.

That is the complete market history of Amari Cooper, as near as six years of NFL front offices could price him. Same player. Same route-running, same hands. The only thing that changed between the first trade and the third was time — and the league's cold arithmetic about what a wide receiver is worth at 24, at 27, and at 30. You can trace all three deals in the Amari Cooper trade tree.

Oakland was selling the future to buy the future

On October 22, 2018, the Oakland Raiders were 1-5 and Jon Gruden was collecting first-round picks like they were going out of style — he had already shipped Khalil Mack to Chicago that September. Cooper, 24 years old and two years removed from back-to-back 1,000-yard seasons to open his career, went to the Dallas Cowboys for a 2019 first-rounder.¹

Dallas was 3-4 and desperate in a specific, humiliating way: in the first season without Dez Bryant and the retired Jason Witten, Cowboys receivers had combined for exactly one 100-yard game through seven weeks, by Cole Beasley.¹ The Cowboys paid the steepest price of the three trades — a first-rounder for a receiver who had one touchdown on the season and was sitting in the concussion protocol — because Jerry Jones believed the 2018 season was still salvageable.

He was right. Dallas went 7-2 after the trade, won the NFC East, and Cooper caught 53 passes for 725 yards and six touchdowns in nine games, earning his third Pro Bowl selection.² He torched Seattle for 106 yards in the wild-card round. Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones, asked about the missing first-rounder before the 2019 draft, said: "When the Raiders pick our pick, we'll be watching Amari Cooper highlight tapes."²

That pick slid all the way to No. 27 as Dallas kept winning. The Raiders spent it on Mississippi State safety Johnathan Abram.³ So the first line of the ledger reads: one Pro Bowl receiver, age 24, for the 27th overall pick — a price Dallas was happy to pay twice over.

Dallas decided it was paying the wrong player

Three and a half years later, the same front office could not give Cooper away fast enough. In March 2022 the Cowboys traded Cooper and a sixth-round pick to the Cleveland Browns for a fifth-round pick and a sixth-round pick — a 2022 fifth (#155) and sixth (#193) going to Dallas, Dallas's 2022 sixth (#202) going to Cleveland along with Cooper.⁴

The decay from the 2018 price is the story. Cooper had caught 68 passes for 865 yards and eight touchdowns in 2021, and his $20 million salary for 2022 became fully guaranteed on March 20.⁴ Dallas had been openly shopping him for cap relief, and the market knew it. When every team in the league knows you have to move a contract, a first-round receiver becomes a fifth-round receiver. The deal was agreed in principle on March 12 — Adam Schefter reported it that day — and finalized on March 16.⁵

The picks all landed on real players. Dallas turned #155 and #193 into offensive tackle Matt Waletzko and linebacker Devin Harper, both noted at the time as selections made with picks acquired from Cleveland.⁶ Cleveland used #202 on Oklahoma wideout Michael Woods II. So the second line of the ledger reads: one Pro Bowl receiver, age 27, for a fifth-rounder, a sixth-rounder, and a nine-slot swap of sixth-rounders. Dallas had paid a first-rounder for him at 24 and recouped a fifth at 27, and nobody involved thought that was wrong.

Cleveland bought the bounce-back, then sold the rental

Cleveland, it turned out, got the best football of the three buyers. Cooper started all 17 games in 2022 and posted a career-best nine receiving touchdowns, then followed it in 2023 with career highs of 72 receptions and 1,250 yards, a fifth Pro Bowl selection, and a franchise-record 265 receiving yards in a single game against Houston.⁷⁸

But the 2024 Browns were a 1-5 disaster with the league's worst offense, Cooper was 30 and in the final year of a restructured deal, and Buffalo — 4-2 off a Monday night win over the Jets, one day after the Jets had traded for Davante Adams, still searching for a true No. 1 receiver for Josh Allen after the Stefon Diggs trade — needed a rental.⁹ On October 15, 2024, the Bills sent a 2025 third-round pick and a conditional 2026 seventh-round pick to Cleveland for Cooper and a 2025 sixth-round pick.⁹ It was, as the reports noted at the time, the third trade of Cooper's career.

The rental did not take. A wrist injury cost him two games almost immediately after he arrived; he finished with 20 catches for 297 yards and two touchdowns in eight games with Buffalo, then six catches for 41 yards across three playoff games as the Bills fell to Kansas City in the AFC title game.¹⁰¹⁴ His 547 total receiving yards for the 2024 season were a career low.¹⁰

The picks tell the rest. Cleveland spent the third-rounder — No. 94 overall — on Oregon quarterback Dillon Gabriel.¹¹ Buffalo's sixth-rounder, No. 204, ended up back in Dallas via the chain of custody and became Oregon offensive lineman Ajani Cornelius.¹² So the third line of the ledger reads: one five-time Pro Bowl receiver, age 30, for half a season, 297 yards, and a quarterback picked 94th.

The depreciation curve

First-rounder at 24. A fifth and a pick swap at 27. A third-round rental at 30. No one misjudged anything along the way — each price was exactly what the market said, given the age, the contract, and the leverage. That's what makes it a case study rather than a controversy. The receiver aging curve isn't a theory; it's a receipt, and Cooper's is itemized across three trades and six years.

There is a coda the ledger doesn't capture. In August 2025, eleven months after the Bills rental ended, Cooper signed with the Las Vegas Raiders — the franchise that had drafted him fourth overall in 2015, back when it played in Oakland and he was the future. Nine days later, three days before the season opener, he told the team he was done. He "no longer has the desire" to play, Ian Rapoport reported.¹³ He finished with 10,033 receiving yards and five Pro Bowl selections in ten seasons.¹³

The tree ends where it began: with the Raiders. Oakland sold him for a first-rounder in 2018; Las Vegas signed him for nothing in 2025 and got nine days. In between, the market priced the same player three times — and got a little more honest each time.

Trade terms, teams, and dates verified against the site's trade tree for this deal and cross-checked with the sources below.

Sources

Explore the trade tree behind this story:

Amari Cooper (2018) trade tree

About this article: it was drafted with AI assistance from the Football Trade Trees database and public reporting, then reviewed by a human editor. Spot an error? Email [email protected].