Here’s a good story from Jenny Vrentas about compensatory draft picks in the NFL. The NFL provides extra picks to teams who lose more unrestricted free agents than they sign, and no team has manipulated the system quite like the Ravens.

The NFL’s formula for doling out these compensatory picks is a secret, but in general, the best players and the players signed to the biggest deals yield the best draft picks the following year, although compensatory picks are limited to rounds three through seven. Last year, Baltimore lost Dannell Ellerbe, Paul Kruger, Ed Reed, and Cary Williams to other teams; as a result, the Ravens now have an extra pick at the end of the third round, two at the end of the fourth, and another at the end of the fifth. The maximum number of compensatory picks a team can receive in a year is four, so Baltimore and Ozzie Newsome fared about as well as possible under the system.

The Jets are the only other team that will receive four compensatory picks in the 2014 Draft. New York lost Dustin Keller, Matt Slauson, Yeremiah Bell, Mike DeVito, Shonn Greene and LaRon Landry. Teams get credit for their net free agents lost: with a max of four picks, the Jets could go out and sign two UFAs from other teams in 2013, and that’s exactly what John Idzik did by signing Mike Goodson and Antwan Barnes. As a result, the Jets will get a 4th and three 6th rounders.

Since the actual NFL formula is a secret (and may be tweaked from year to year), nobody knows exactly how the picks will be awarded in any season (Philly.com has a very good article about the process).  One thing to keep in mind is that not all free agent signings will hurt a team in the compensatory picks game.  As Vrentas notes about the Ravens decisions during free agency:

They added receiver Steve Smith and tight end Owen Daniels, but since both players had been cut by their previous teams, they don’t count in the league’s compensatory picks formula. Nor do players signed after June 1, which helped the Ravens last year, when they filled a void at inside linebacker by signing Daryl Smith on June 5.

I did my best to compile all compensatory picks from 2003 to 2013. ^[1]Why 2003? The compensatory pick scheme began in 1994.  That year, the Eagles received a pick at the end of the first round for losing Reggie White.  The 2002 draft was a bit funky because the … Continue reading Then, I assigned the appropriate AV draft value to each slot to see which teams have fared the best over that time frame when it comes to receiving free picks.

This analysis ignores 2014, but the Ravens easily lead the pack in both picks awarded and draft value awarded.  Take a look:

By my count, eight players taken with compensatory picks from ’03 to ’13 have made a Pro Bowl: Le’Ron McClain (Baltimore), Ovie Mughelli (Baltimore but made the Pro Bowl with Atlanta), Antoine Bethea (Indianapolis), Dustin Colquitt (Kansas City), Derek Anderson (Baltimore, but made the Pro Bowl with Cleveland — no really, I swear this happened), Scott Wells (Green Bay), David Tyree (Helmet School of Arts), and Yeremiah Bell (Miami). The best player to have been selected with a compensatory pick in the last decade was probably Marques Colston, although he has never made a Pro Bowl.

The table below shows all the players I’ve identified as compensatory picks (I may be missing some). I’m deliberately showing only 5 rows so as to not bog down the page, but you can change that number to 100 using the dropdown box, and then use the arrow key to see the rest. And, of course, the table is fully searchable.

Finally, let me conclude with one of the best lines in Vrentas’ article. It comes from Eric DeCosta, Baltimore’s GM-in-waiting and the guy at the top of the list of every owner who just fired his GM every January.

“We look at the draft as, in some respects, a luck-driven process. The more picks you have, the more chances you have to get a good player,” DeCosta says. “When we look at teams that draft well, it’s not necessarily that they’re drafting better than anybody else, it seems to be that they have more picks. There’s definitely a correlation between the amount of picks and drafting good players.”

Guarding against overconfidence is really important, and DeCosta seems to understand that. And I don’t think he’d disagree with my article questioning whether certain teams really are better at drafting than others.