UPDATE (March 26): In light of the news that the NFL erred in awarding three of the compensatory picks, this post has been altered to reflect those changes.
NOTE: I will be in the process of changing OTC’s draft page to calibrate its showing of the compensatory draft picks with the official release. This may take some time to fully complete.
As you all know by now, the 2015 compensatory draft picks have been officially released. After comparing the press release to my program, here are the results:
So how did some of these picks get missed? The three yellow lines are pretty self explanatory: I just had the APY cutoffs between rounds a bit off. This promoted Baltimore’s pick for Corey Graham from a 6th to a 5th, and demoted Denver’s picks for Knowshon Moreno and Shaun Phillips from 6ths to 7ths.
Let’s move on to the player qualifications, the biggest question that I had. The following relevant players did not qualify that I thought might not:
*There was no mention of Dallas nor New Orleans in the press release. Therefore, at least two of these players did not qualify, but perhaps three or all four did not.
As a small pat on the back, I did correctly guess that both Ben Tate and LeGarrette Blount would qualify despite being cut midseason, and I also correctly guessed that Jonathan Dwyer would not qualify due to his placement on the NFI list following his domestic violence arrest.
These non-qualifying players resulted in the five blue lines that I anticipated:
Now onto those unfortunate red lines:
I thought Seattle would get two 5ths and one 6th, but they instead got one 5th and two 6ths. At first I thought Breno Giacomini somehow got demoted, but now I believe he actually got promoted due to playing 100% of the snaps, and I’m speculating the same with Zane Beadles as to why the 4th Denver got for him was higher than I thought. Instead, I’m now thinking the 6th they got was for Brandon Browner, and he had his value lowered due to his four-game suspension. When Browner’s original $5.05 million APY is multiplied by 13/17 (signifying a removal of four game checks), his “new” APY of $3.86 million fits in perfectly on the list, and as a 6th round value.
For the future, this is an extremely important development for the Carolina Panthers and Dallas Cowboys (and their fans), and you probably already know I’m referring to Greg Hardy for the 2016 comp picks. If he is suspended for a lengthy time due to his domestic violence, that could reduce the round of the comp pick that Carolina potentially gets for him, and it could also make the cancellation chart more favorable for Dallas.
UPDATE: these two items below resulted from an error by the NFL. I’m keeping the text here to help explain where the NFL made that error.
In addition, although this does not show up as a red line in the table above, I also missed that Jeff Linkenbach did not qualify in favor of Indianapolis and against Kansas City. This cost Indianapolis a 7th that I thought they would get for him (though they still got one 7th for Kavell Conner for a different reason). As Jason pointed out in the comments, I had not noticed that part of Linkenbach’s contract included a $150,000 workout bonus, which does not count in determining a player’s APY in the compensatory formula. Therefore, Linkenbach’s APY should have been $750,000 instead of $900,000. Had I known that, he would have been placed squarely on the qualification bubble, and I would have written up a scenario in which Linkenbach would not have qualified.
I have declared this to be Part 1 because I anticipate I will have more to tell as I learn more, and there could be implications for the 2016 projections and beyond. Stay tuned for future updates.
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