The Big Promise of Brandin Cooks

The smallest man in this year’s NFL draft just might be the most talented

“Wherever I go,” Cooks says, “I know I’m going to do it better than those guys considered top-five, top-10 picks.” This is how Cooks talks. At 20, he’s young, but he never seems brash. He isn’t trying to convince anyone of anything. He already knows.

Just ask Brian Gray. Six weeks before the combine, Cooks was back in his hometown of Stockton, California, having lunch with Gray, his former coach at Lincoln High School. They were talking about the 40-yard dash, and what Cooks expected to run: “He said, ‘Coach, I’m going to force some people to make some tough decisions when I pull off this 4.3.’”


The first race Brandin Cooks ever lost was to a red Lincoln Town Car speeding past his house on Stockton Street. Cooks was 9 and in line at an ice cream truck across the road when he heard Worth Jr. calling. As Worth dangled the dollar for his sherbet from their mother’s second-floor window, Cooks bolted from around the truck. The car was only a few feet away. The boy jumped, but his little legs weren’t enough. He landed flush on the hood before rolling off the side. There were no broken bones, just a scared mother and a guilt-stricken brother. Sitting at the hospital, Andrea Cooks told her son he’d have to miss school the next day. “He ended up going anyway,” she says. “He just wanted to challenge everything.”

On a Saturday afternoon last July, Brent Brennan got a text message from OSU’s offensive line coach, who was on his way to a wedding near campus. All he could see in the attached photo was a blurry body with one line of context: Check this **** out.
It was Cooks, alone on the volleyball courts a couple of blocks from the facility, doing cone drills in the sand. “He is working out in a place where no one on our staff would ever see him,” Brennan says. “He’s not doing it for anybody but himself. That’s why he is who he is.”