Ian Cummings kept Ja’Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson and cut Davante Adams and Tyreek Hill, and only half of that should survive contact with an argument.
The Chase half is settled. The second slot is where the Football Debate Club exercise gets interesting, because Cummings picked two receivers who win the exact same way and then cut the one whose skill nobody else on the board has.
Ja’Marr Chase Is the Only Automatic Keep in This Wide Receiver Debate
“He’s the only receiver of this group to have a top-10 all-time PFN Receiver Impact score. 2024, 94.5,” Cummings said. He built the rest of the case on yards after the catch. “In all five seasons of his career, he has eclipsed 100 yards of [YAC] over expectation. In contrast, the other three receivers only have three total seasons of the sort.”
The 2024 triple crown backs it up. Chase led the NFL in receptions (127), receiving yards (1,708) and receiving touchdowns (17). Then 2025 handed the debate a stress test nobody designed. Joe Burrow missed nine games with a toe injury, Jake Browning and Joe Flacco took the snaps, and Chase still led the league with 185 targets on his way to 125 catches for 1,412 yards and a WR4 finish in PPR.
Cummings’ scouting report on Jefferson is accurate. “6-1, 33-inch arms, 4.4 speed, arguably the best separator of the group with the most expansive route tree, the next best [YAC] chops behind Ja’Marr Chase, and he can catch literally anything,” he said. All of that is true.
This isn’t a Kirk Cousins argument, either. Jefferson went for 103 catches, 1,533 yards and 10 touchdowns with Sam Darnold throwing to him in 2024. The gap is narrower and more specific than that. Chase produced a WR4 season with Browning and Flacco.
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Jefferson, working mostly with J.J. McCarthy in 2025, fell to 84 catches for 1,048 yards and two touchdowns. He started all 17 games, extended his streak of 1,000-yard seasons to six and reached the end zone twice.
Why Davante Adams Is the Wrong Cut in This Wide Receiver Debate
“Davante Adams was and is a TD machine,” Cummings said, and then cut him anyway.
The number he cited is real. Adams caught 61 touchdowns from 2018 through 2022, a stretch that includes an 18-score season in 2020 and 14 more in his first year with the Raiders after leaving Aaron Rodgers behind. He set the Las Vegas single-season receiving record that year with 1,516 yards, which is the cleanest evidence any of these four has that the production travels.
Here’s what makes the cut look worse. In 2025, in his 12th NFL season, on 60 catches for 789 yards in 14 games with the Rams, Adams led the NFL in receiving touchdowns with 14, three clear of the next-closest player. It was his third receiving touchdown title, after 2020 and 2022. He did it on a career-worst 52.6% catch rate, which tells you the rest of his game had eroded and the scoring had not.
Nine of those 14 scores came from inside the 5-yard line. His 42 career touchdowns from that range are the most by any player since 2000.
That’s the whole argument. Separation erodes. Route depth erodes. Winning a one-on-one from the 6-yard line with a defender draped on you does not, and it’s the one thing a Chase and Jefferson pairing has to manufacture rather than simply possess. Touchdown totals regress, and Adams enters his age-34 season, so nobody should project 14 again. But the exercise is about primes, and in his prime that was the most durable asset on the board.
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Hill is the cut that lands. “In his career, he never averaged below 3 yards of separation at the catch point and was averaging almost 0.6 EPA per target at his peak,” Cummings said, and the 2023 season that produced a league-best 1,799 yards was as good as any of it. He is also a free agent in August, released by Miami in February after a dislocated knee and multiple torn ligaments ended his 2025 season in Week 4. Which is exactly why the debate has to be about primes. The present tense would have made this too easy.
