CeeDee Lamb spent four seasons as one of the NFL’s untouchable receivers. This offseason, he slid to 55th on the league’s Top 100 of 2026, a 20-spot fall from 35th in his fifth straight appearance. His fellow star Nico Collins fell too, landing at 58th after ranking 32nd a year ago. Both drops are steep. Only one is surprising.
That is the argument PFN’s Ian Cummings made on the latest Football Debate Club, and it rests on how entrenched Lamb has been.
Why CeeDee Lamb’s Top 100 Slide Surprises More Than Nico Collins’
“In my opinion, Lamb’s ranking is a little bit more surprising given how entrenched he’s been as a top receiver in the league,” Cummings said. Lamb ranked just outside the top 10 on the 2024 list on the strength of his monster 2023 season. Two years later he sits outside the top 50, and the player closing the gap shares his huddle.
George Pickens arrived in Dallas and reshaped the target math immediately. Pickens led the Cowboys in the three major receiving categories in 2025, and Lamb’s counting stats dipped with it. Lamb caught 75 passes for 1,077 yards and 3 touchdowns in 14 games, still 11th in the league in receiving yards, but a quieter season than the one that made him a household name. Cummings sees Pickens as a real threat to leapfrog Lamb on these lists going forward.
On PFN’s Top 100, the two receivers sit nearly even, Collins 27th to Lamb’s 28th. The published gap is a single spot. The trend underneath it is not.
Nico Collins Has Quietly Passed CeeDee Lamb
The 2025 season was a quiet turning point in PFN’s WR Impact metric. “That was quietly the first year that Collins graded over Lamb in PFN’s wide receiver impact scoring, grading 10th overall with a score of 80.5 to Lamb’s 78.3,” Cummings said, adding that Lamb ranked “just 21st in the league.”
The underlying numbers back the shift. “Collins had less average separation, but he had more cumulative receiving EPA, more first downs, much more [RAC] yards over expectation, and a lower drop rate as well,” Cummings said. Collins turned that profile into 1,117 yards and 6 touchdowns across 15 games, his third straight 1,000-yard season behind Houston’s uneven pass protection.
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The film matches the data. “Lamb is still that guy. He’s not cooked by any stretch,” Cummings said, “but Nico Collins is a true physical specimen at 6-4, 215 with 4.4 speed and 34-inch arms, really real bend and route running chops, and he still doesn’t get his due.”
That is the crux of it. Collins keeps producing at a top-10 level and keeps getting slotted behind names with more wattage. Lamb is the bigger brand. Collins, for now, is the better bet.
Neither receiver belongs near the fringe of a Top 100, and Cummings said as much: “I think both players do still deserve to be in the top 50, but for me, Collins has the edge.” The players who vote on the NFL list disagreed on the placement and, arguably, on the order. The tape suggests they had it backwards.
If Pickens sticks in Dallas and Collins keeps stacking 1,000-yard seasons in Houston, the question stops being which ranking was more surprising. It becomes how long the lists take to catch up.
