On March 11, the 2025 compensatory draft picks were released, with a correction issued by the NFL Management Councit on March 14 that will be described in detail below. As always, upon seeing the official release it’s proper to judge how my projection did against it.

Highlighted in green, I got 26 of 32 comp picks correct with the correct player and the correct round.

Highlighted in yellow, there were 4 comp picks I got the correct team to, but was off by one round. Each player falls into different categories as to why I missed the round:

• For Kenneth Murray (6th to the Chargers instead of a 5th), this was just within the usual margin of error of missing on the total number of players used to establish the cutoffs for each round. This draft, I estimate that the number the NFL Management used was about 1,936 in order to make the cutoffs for all players work
• For Xavier McKinney (3rd to the Giants instead of a 4th), it is also likely cutoff related, but in a different direction. I did properly add McKinney’s postseason honors into the database. My guess here is that there were tiebreakers that put McKinney ahead of equal valued contracts, and perhaps postseason honors can serve as a secondary sortition
• For Bobby Wagner (5th to the Seahawks instead of a 6th), I missed that he had earned $750,000 worth of incentives for playing more than 75% of the snaps, making the Pro Bowl, and the Commanders ranking in the top half of the league in total yards.
• For Jordan Elliott (7th to the Browns instead of a 6th), I simply had his base APY wrong–it should have been $3.5 million instead of $5 million, the difference likely being in incentives that weren’t earned.

Highlighted in blue, there was 1 comp pick I got wrong due to projecting an incorrect cancellation, but that I anticipated that I could be wrong. This was due to Sam Darnold’s contract with the Vikings falling on the 5th round side of the 4th/5th round cutoff, instead of the 4th. This caused Darnold to be canceled out by the signing of Leonard Floyd, instead opening up a 7th rounder for Clelin Farrell going to DC.

Highlighted in red, there was 1 comp pick I got wrong on an incorrect cancellation I did not anticipate. That was due to Carson Wentz not qualifying as a compensatory free agent. With him, as with Elliott, I had the wrong base APY: it should have been $2.5 million instead of $3.5 million. His incentives were $100,000 for each game he played 50% of the snaps and the team won. He only met the snap requirement in one game–a game the Chiefs decidedly did not win. Without Wentz, the Chiefs got an extra 7th rounder for Tommy Townsend going to Houston. This also resulted in exactly 32 regular comp picks being award, thus depriving the Browns of a supplementary 7th rounder that I had projected for them.

As always, I need to be more diligent in making sure that all earned incentives are accounted for, as demonstrated with Wagner, as well as a few other players in which their order was different than I anticipated, even if the round was correct. I also need to stay frosty to the reality that reports coming from agent sources are more likely to express only maximum APYs inflated by incentives, increasingly without even including the “up to” weasel words to tip us off. I had unusually too many mistakes with that this draft, as with both Elliott and Wentz, and also with Geno Stone, of whom I was alerted to before the official comp pick release happened.

But I’m not the only one who is fallible: the NFL Management Council also made a mistake in its initial release. It originally awarded the Dolphins two 7th rounders, and nothing for the Saints. That’s because it initially listed Cedrick Wilson Jr. as a compensatory free agent. That mystified me at first, as I first thought that I had just forgotten to add him, which would be rare for me to do. But after the correction, I remembered that he was declared ineligible to become a CFA, as was clearly shown in the NFLMC’s official 2024 free agency press release, due to his contract being shortened by the Dolphins in 2023.