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The NFL announced the list of compensatory draft picks Thursday afternoon and several top teams scored big.
Naturally, fans spent the night complaining, again, about the league supposedly being rigged.
The NFL ended up awarding 37 compensatory picks to 16 different teams.
What really raised fans’ eyebrows and revived the NFL being rigged conspiracy was the fact that of those 37 compensatory draft picks, a whopping seven of them went to the San Francisco 49ers.
📰 A total of 37 compensatory draft selections in the 2023 NFL Draft have been awarded to 16 teams, the NFL announced today.
💡 Here are these 37 compensatory picks – sorted by team pic.twitter.com/hZtwIUTiNd
— René Bugner (@RNBWCV) March 9, 2023
How the hell does San Fran have THREE THIRD ROUND COMP PICKS?!? They didn’t lose any stars. #NFLRigged https://t.co/6VYOZ2zLV1
— Buffalo Dyl (@DylanSabo4) March 9, 2023
“Good grief, SF was almost gifted an entire draft,” another fan tweeted.
It's absolutely amazing the Eagles staff gets gutted, again and we dont get any compensatory picks. DC/OC and nada. Meanwhile other teams are "working the system"
— http://ftandrews.bsky.social (@ftandru) March 9, 2023
“No idea how this works. But how do the Colts not have one pick? We had Sam Ehlinger at qb last year…” tweeted a sad Indy fan.
Damn., give my Jets one or two just to compensate for us being bad so long?
— Mike Sackett (@mikesackett85) March 9, 2023
According to Dan Parr of NFL.com, “The 37 compensatory picks include five special selections that were awarded at the end of the third round to teams that have had a minority employee hired as a head coach or primary football executive by another club. Three of those picks were awarded to San Francisco. The special compensatory picks were instituted as an amendment to the 2020 Collective Bargaining Agreement in an effort to promote equal employment opportunities within NFL teams.”
The rest of the picks were awarded to a team if they lost more or better compensatory free agents than it acquires in the previous year is eligible to receive compensatory draft picks.
Who decides if a team lost better players than it acquired? Well, the NFL league office does.
“The compensatory picks are positioned from Round 3 to Round 7 based on the value of the compensatory free agents lost,” Parr explained. “The formula that determines compensatory free agents is based on salary, playing time and postseason honors.”
What that formula is, he didn’t say.
So there you go. Based on that magic formula and the extra Collective Bargaining Agreement picks, the 49ers will get three third round picks, one fifth round pick, one sixth round pick, and two seventh round picks.
Other playoff teams that also received multiple compensatory draft picks include the Dallas Cowboys, Kansas City Chiefs, Green Bay Packers, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and New York Giants.
Of the non-playoff teams, the Los Angeles Rams received the second most picks with four, while the Arizona Cardinals, Las Vegas Raiders, New England Patriots, and Washington Commanders all also received more than one pick.