The compensatory pick formula has always notably lacked transparency. Salaries, playing time and league honors dictate some version of the ranking of free agents lost to other teams. Those end up in a list of compensatory picks distributed among teams that lost more than they gained the previous offseason.
Advertisement
Only, this year, the NFL management council that distributes the picks made a mistake. One that could make a significant difference in the Cincinnati Bengals’ NFL Draft haul.
After announcing Friday that Cincinnati would receive two sixth-round picks, the council came back after the error and switched to giving the Bengals a third-round (No. 97) and a sixth-round (No. 214) pick.
Adding a third-round pick out of thin air would be considered one of Cincinnati’s first major wins of the offseason.
New March 11, 2024
Here’s how it happened.
The Bengals lost four free agents that qualified in the compensatory pick formula last year:
• Jessie Bates III
• Vonn Bell
• Hayden Hurst
• Samaje Perine
Cincinnati signed two players who qualified in the compensatory pick formula last year:
• Orlando Brown Jr.
• Nick Scott
Depending on where the council ranked Bates and Brown, those two were thought to cancel each other out, wiping a potential third-round pick off the board for the Bengals.
It left behind picks given at a sixth-round level for the loss of Bell and Hurst. Perine and Scott canceled each other out.
However, the council found an error in the distribution sent to teams, spotted on X, formerly Twitter, by compensatory pick guru Nick Korte of Over the Cap.
He sums it up well here:
If Jessie Bates's contract was valued as a 3rd, and Orlando Brown Jr.'s was valued as a 4th, this is what the Bengals' cancellation chart would have looked like: a 3rd and a 6th, instead of two 6ths. pic.twitter.com/ggdirDLfnP
— Nick Korte (@nickkorte) March 8, 2024
The error came in the line drawn between the third-round level and the fourth-round level. Specifically, one that pushed Bates into the third-round level and kept Brown down at the fourth-round level.
Still with me?
That meant Bates’ departure now counted as a third-round pick to the Bengals, with Brown instead canceling out Bell as a sixth-round pick.
All of that craziness is a long way to say the council screwed up and the Bengals added a pick at the end of the third round that the original memo didn’t give to them.
Cincinnati now has one pick in every round, except two in the third and two in the sixth.
GO DEEPER
Howe: A peek behind the scenes of the Kirk Cousins, Russell Wilson, Baker Mayfield deals
(Photo: Kevin Sabitus / Getty Images)