10 seasons, 2 rings: Cooper Kupp's road home to Seattle

Ten seasons, counted honestly

The 10 in our headline is plain arithmetic: eight seasons in Los Angeles from 2017 through 2024, then 2025 and 2026 in Seattle. The regular-season numbers below come from his NFL.com player page. Read the games column as closely as the yards. It explains a lot about what happened in March 2025.

Two offers out of Yakima

Nobody handed him this. A resolution adopted by the Washington State Senate on February 28, 2022, records that he left Davis High with two scholarship offers, from Idaho State and Eastern Washington. He took Eastern's, spent 2012 on the scout team, and left Cheney holding the FCS career records for catches (428), yards (6,464) and touchdown receptions (73). His grandfather Jake and father Craig were both drafted by NFL teams, so when the Rams took him 69th overall in 2017, the Kupps became the fifth three-generation family in NFL history, according to Eastern Washington. We tell the college years in full in our companion piece on his Eastern Washington career.

The season everyone still measures against

In 2021 Kupp led the league in catches, yards and touchdown receptions, at the time only the fourth receiver to do that since the 1970 merger, per the Rams. Then he won Super Bowl LVI on February 13, 2022, catching the go-ahead 1-yard touchdown from Matthew Stafford with 1:25 left in a 23-20 win over Cincinnati. He finished with eight catches, 92 yards and two scores, and NFL.com noted he joined Joe Montana as the only players to win Offensive Player of the Year and Super Bowl MVP in the same season.

That season is its own rabbit hole. The strangest part of it, the 18 yards that stood between Kupp and the single-season record, gets its own explainer.

Why the Rams let him go

The Rams released Kupp on March 12, 2025, after failing to find a trade partner. ESPN reported that no team would take on the $20 million owed to him for 2025, and the move came days after Los Angeles agreed to terms with Davante Adams. He left as the franchise's third-leading receiver in both catches (634) and touchdown catches (57), behind only Isaac Bruce and Torry Holt, and the club noted he had been voted a captain five times.

I won't pretend the parting was warm. Coverage at the time, summarized by the New York Post, described his camp as unhappy with how it ended. It was a salary decision about a receiver who had missed chunks of three straight seasons, and it stung anyway.

Washington back across his chest

Seattle moved fast. ESPN reported a three-year, $45 million agreement on March 14, 2025, and the Seahawks list March 18 as the signing date. Yakima sits about 140 miles southeast of Seattle, and the team's site notes he spent 23 years living in the state before joining the club. His post on X that week was five words and five exclamation points: “Washington back across my chest. Let's go!!!!!”

The length and total of that contract are in the reports I read. Guarantees and year-by-year structure were not in ESPN's story, so I am not going to guess at them here.

The playoff run that wrote its own ending

His first Seattle season was quieter on paper: 47 catches, 593 yards and two touchdowns in 16 games. The Seahawks' John Boyle pointed out that his 12.6 yards per catch was his best since 2021, though, and January was a different story.

For the NFC Championship, the Seahawks' game log shows four catches and the New York Post counted six, so I have left the number out and kept the part everyone agrees on: Sam Darnold found him for a 13-yard touchdown that put Seattle up 31-20 over the team that had released him, in his home state, with a Super Bowl trip on the line. For my money, the championship game is the better story.

The ring made a little history too. Kupp became only the second receiver, after Jerry Rice, to own both an Offensive Player of the Year award and two Super Bowl titles, and his Seahawks page notes he is one of three players to lead two different teams in receiving yards in a Super Bowl.

What a 33-year-old receiver does for Seattle now

The case for Kupp in 2026 is only partly about catches. Boyle's August 26 piece describes a veteran who sits in on quarterback meetings and works with several position groups and the coaching staff. Coach Mike Macdonald said, “I think he's taught me more than I've taught him.” Jaxon Smith-Njigba put it more simply: “It's like having an extra coach out there. Everybody trusts him.”

That is an unusual thing for a triple crown winner to say out loud, and I believe him. The numbers he now helps produce for other people will never show up next to his name.

The ring he helped design

When the Seahawks handed out their Super Bowl LX rings in June 2026, designer Jason Arasheben said the firm had sat down with Kupp, Smith-Njigba and other players to ask what mattered to them. The result carries 12 feathers for the fans, 50 diamonds for the franchise's 50th season, an engraving of the team's 17 combined wins, and a mechanism that opens a model of the stadium's arches to reveal the words World Champions. The team calls it the largest Super Bowl ring ever made.

A kid who once had two scholarship offers now owns a ring with a hidden door in it. Ten seasons in, the count that matters to him comes out even: two chances out of high school, two championships since.