Most "team's WR1" pieces end up sounding the same: the offense funnels the ball through one guy, everyone else is scenery. What Houston has done with Nico Collins is a different kind of thing. Across four seasons under three different offensive contexts, the Texans have narrowed Collins into a specialized role — the mid-and-deep-target receiver — and built the rest of the pass-catching room to work around him, not next to him. 2025 was the year the role finished baking.

Table of Contents

1. The 2025 snapshot
2. The four-year climb
3. A room built around Collins, not beside him
4. The Stroud split

The 2025 snapshot

The Texans threw 634 targets with a recorded air-yards value in 2025. 212 of them traveled 10+ yards downfield. Collins was the intended receiver on 72 of those 212 — 34.0%. He also accounted for 30.1% of Houston's team air yards (1,587 of 5,276), and on 128 targets he averaged 12.5 air yards per target.

For context, the rest of the Texans' pass game lived much closer to the line of scrimmage. Every other Houston pass-catcher averaged 7.2 air yards per target as a group. Collins' average throw traveled roughly five and a half yards deeper than everyone else's on the same roster.

He wasn't just the deep option, either. Of Houston's 69 targets thrown 20+ yards downfield in 2025, Collins was the receiver on 22 — the single largest chunk on the team — but he also absorbed the intermediate work between 10 and 20 yards that the rest of the room simply wasn't asked to run.

The four-year climb

The interesting part is that Collins didn't arrive in this role. Houston built it around him, one season at a time. Here is his share of the Texans' 10+ air-yard targets and his average depth of target, year by year:

His slice of the team's air yards followed the same monotone climb: 16.8% → 18.8% → 25.2% → 25.9% → 30.1%. It's the sort of curve you get when a coaching staff isn't discovering something in-season but iterating on a plan across offseasons — first give him the routes, then give him more of them, then remove the players who compete for them, then push the depth of his average target higher when the surrounding room can absorb the check-down volume he used to run.

A room built around Collins, not beside him

The clearest evidence that this is a role-division scheme, not just a target-hog story, is what the rest of the pass-catchers look like in 2025:

Schultz and Kirk are the underneath layer — sub-8-yard average depths of target, backed by comparable YAC-per-reception numbers to Collins himself. Hutchinson runs a moderate-depth complementary role. And Woody Marks is essentially a screen back: a 2.2-air-yard average target with a 9.2 YAC-per-reception number that says almost everything he touches is designed to get the ball into his hands behind or at the line and let him run.

Jayden Higgins is the interesting name here. His 12.5 average AY matches Collins' exactly — the Texans have started developing a second downfield option — but he ran 45 fewer targets and caught 50 of 83 for 623 yards. He's the apprentice version of the role, not a co-lead.

The point is that no other Texans pass-catcher does what Collins does. The room is stratified: one deep/intermediate specialist, one intermediate secondary, one middle-of-field tight end, a slot, a checkdown, and a screen back. Contrast that with the more common WR1 structures around the league, where the "star" and the No. 2 tend to have similar aDOTs and split the deep work.

The Stroud split

The role also shows up cleanly in what C.J. Stroud does when Collins is the read versus everyone else. On Stroud's 91 targets to Collins in 2025:

• Average air yards: 12.7
• EPA/target: +0.28
• 49 receptions, 789 receiving yards

On Stroud's 389 targets to every other Texans pass-catcher:

• Average air yards: 7.2
• EPA/target: +0.16
• 265 receptions

Same quarterback, same offense, roughly a 5.5-yard gap in average target depth, and Collins is a more efficient target on a per-play basis despite the throws being materially harder. Stroud's aggressive-throw budget in this offense runs, in effect, through one route tree.

None of this is to say Collins had a career year on the counting stats — his 1,138 receiving yards on 74 catches were down from his 2023 peak (91-1,461) and his 2024 line (80-1,209), and his EPA/target slipped from +0.62 in 2023 to +0.29 in 2025 as the average throw got harder and Davis Mills absorbed 37 of his 128 targets. But the role itself — the piece Houston has been building since 2021 — read as finished in 2025. Collins is now the designated mid-and-deep target on a roster whose other pass-catchers have been deliberately shaped to do everything else.

Whether that's the right architecture is a separate question. If I were projecting 2026 I'd expect Higgins' share of the downfield work to keep climbing and Collins' aDOT to hold or tick up again — that's the direction the four-year curve points. But the descriptive claim, at least, is one the numbers make cleanly: this isn't a WR1 who dominates targets. It's a WR1 who dominates one kind of target, and a roster built to make that possible.