Texas A&M’s list of career receiving yards and touchdown leaders is pockmarked with recent players.

Nine of the top 10 in career yards played at least three seasons in the 21st century. Bob Long (1966-68) and Tony Harrison (1990-93) are notable exceptions in Aggies history.

But there are three clear options for best A&M receiver ever: Jeff Fuller, Ryan Swope and Mike Evans.

Fuller is the only player to more or less get a prominent role for four seasons in College Station. For that, he’s first or second in all-time catches, receiving yards and touchdowns. Longevity matters, and he was a good receiver. Even topped 1,000 yards in 2010, and spent a training camp with the Miami Dolphins.

But no one can say with a straight face that he was a better or more dominant receiver than the other two, since all three overlapped. And his career numbers aren’t so far beyond Swopes and Evans that he gets the title based on the breadth of his contributions.

Swope is the team’s all-time leader in catches and yards. He made second-team all-conference in the Big 12 (2011) and the SEC (2012). His blazing speed earned him a sixth-round draft pick courtesy of the Arizona Cardinals, but lingering concussion issues forced him to retire before his NFL career even got started.

In ’12, his senior season with the Aggies, Johnny Manziel won the Heisman Trophy and threw for more than 3,700 yards, nearly equaling Ryan Tannehill’s ’11 total to a yard. Yet Swope went from 89 to 72 catches and from 1,207 yards to 913. Swope caught at least one pass in every game, yet become the No. 2 option behind a redshirt freshman, of all things.

That redshirt freshman? The 6-foot-5, 225-pound Evans.

His season-low four catches went for 137 yards in a 59-57 win at then-No. 23 Louisiana Tech. He led the team in catches (82) and receiving yards (1,105), shrugging off the team’s move to the SEC as a non-factor during his first collegiate season.

If besting Swope during the elder’s senior season wasn’t enough, Evans made sure the encore was even better in ’13, when A&M’s playbook sometimes got paired down to Manziel doing pirouettes in the backfield until Evans had enough time to reach the end zone, then heaving it so his receiver could high-point the ball above whatever multiple defenders surrounded him.

His masterpiece came against eventual national champion Alabama in with seven catches for 279 yards, including one of the most ridiculous plays in the SEC in years (at the end of this video below).

For good measure, Evans added 11 catches for 287 yards against Auburn for a two-game total that would’ve placed him on the cusp of the SEC’s Top 20 in receiving yards for the entire season.

The most telling stat: his 68 grabs went for 20.1 yards per catch. He caught 14 fewer passes, faced constant double teams and still finished with 289 more yards than the season prior. With 4.46 speed, a 37-inch vertical leap and enough strength to swat away any press coverage in college, Evans couldn’t be guarded.

Lest his athleticism be mistaken for raw ability, he went seventh overall to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the 2014 NFL draft. During his rookie season, he beat out three-time Pro Bowler Vincent Jackson for the team lead in receiving yards (1,051 to 1,002) despite playing with Josh McCown and Mike Glennon at quarterback.

Evans deserves credit for Manziel’s Heisman, and in many ways was under-appreciated and marginalized as a deep-threat specialist who thrived thanks to Johnny Football’s improvisation.

The only knock on Evans at A&M is that he played just two more seasons. If he stayed one more year and caught 60 passes for 1,000 yards — both would’ve been career lows — he would by far outdistance both Swope and Fuller on the career receiving yards list despite one fewer season.

We recently ranked Evans as the No. 23 best receiver in SEC history, and he would’ve ranked much higher had he played one or two more seasons. But he still claims the title as the best receiver in Texas A&M history.