Bills given D+ grade for WR trade originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

Almost exactly a year ago, the Buffalo Bills took a big swing.

Needing a wide receiver, they pulled off a trade with the Cleveland Browns to get Amari Cooper.

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At the time, it looked like exactly the right move to make.

In hindsight, it doesn’t look so good.

The Bills gave up a 2025 third-round pick to facilitate the deal, and that winds up looking a lot more valuable than whatever Buffalo got out of Cooper.

ESPN’s Bill Barnwell re-graded the trade on Tuesday, dropping the Bills’ mark from an A- at the time of the deal to a D+ now. Not great.

“While I wasn’t overly enthralled with Cooper, I viewed the trade as a clear win for the Bills because the need was both so apparent and crucial,” Barnwell writes. “And even though Cooper had managed only 1.2 yards per route run in 2024, one could partially blame that on struggling Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson. After all, Cooper was also only a year removed from a 72-catch, 1,250-yard season. The move did not pan out nearly as well as I thought. Though Cooper recorded 2.0 yards per route run as a Bill, that dramatically oversells his contributions as he missed a couple games because of a wrist injury and played fewer than half the snaps in the games he did play. He recorded 338 receiving yards over 11 games as a Bill (30.7 yards per game) and started only five games. Cooper was invisible in the playoffs, accumulating only 41 receiving yards over three games.”

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Cooper was then a free agent this offseason and signed with the Las Vegas Raiders.

But only nine days after Cooper signed with the Raiders, he decided to retire.

It was not a pretty end to the career of a guy who was once one of the best wide receivers in all of football.

And his Buffalo chapter will go down as just an odd footnote that should’ve worked out a whole lot better than it did.

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