Wide Receiver and Quarterback is a symbiotic relationship, just the same as QB and O-Line. A great quarterback can make a mediocre O-Line look great and a mediocre WR look great. Take that great quarterback and put him with a great wide receiver, they make each other look HOF-worthy.
If you're creating a list of top-10 receivers based on overall greatness and importance they played to the team, some of these lists are an absolute joke.
Lynn Swann may have been a great receiver, but it's not fair to anyone else on the list to talk about him for anything other than what he did. He was in a run-first offense in a run-first decade and his statistics suffered.
You can pick your poison and either call Swann a 4x Superbowl Champion or you can call him a top-10 receiver. You can't use selected logic when determining someone's worth. You can't say that IF they would've thrown the ball to him more, he would've accumulated the statistics because IF they would've thrown the ball to him more who knows if they would've won those championships.
If you're comparing players by era, of course he's one of the best receivers of the 70s. His inclusion as the number one receiver of the 70s probably has more to do with his Big-Game plays than anything else though.
Lynn Swann played 9 years, which isn't all that much compared to a lot of the guys out there. I'm not for rewarding longevity, unless it's productive longevity. Many receivers were productive well after 9 years.
Compare Swann's stats to Terrell Owens:
OWENS:
Top-10 Receiptions (3 times) Top-5 (2 times)
Top-10 Yards (3 times) Top-5 (2 times)
RecTD First(2 times), Top-5(5 times), Top-10, (7 times)
SWANN:
Top-10 Rec. (2), Top-5(0)
Top-10 Yards (3), Top-5(1)
First(1 time) Top-10 (3), Top-5(2),
This assumes that Terrell Owens retired at the exact same time as Lynn Swann and didn't compile any statistics after 2004. This isn't about counting stats, it's about how often you ranked inside the top-10.
You can look at Terrell's stats and say he accumulated them in a passing era and he did. However, he accumulated them at a greater rate than almost everyone else.
I don't even think Swann was the best receiver on the team! A healthy John Stallworth consistently put up great numbers.