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In his first offseason as the Bengals head coach, Zac Taylor has done a lot to distance himself from the legacy of Marvin Lewis already. Three months into the job, he continues to widen that gap.
NFL.com’s Lance Zierlein projected the number of compensatory picks for each team in 2020, with the Bengals getting none for the first time since 2016.
While the exact formula for awarding compensatory picks has not been released by the NFL, Zierlein can project with a level of certainty that the moves the Bengals made will remove them from contention.
The formula takes into account the average salaries and snap counts of every player to determine how the picks are awarded. The general rule is, if a team loses players in free agency that represent a high salary or snap count, then the team is awarded up to four compensatory picks in rounds three through seven. However, the more or more valuable free agents that team signs, the fewer and later picks they receive.
In the Bengals case, they lost Cedric Ogbuehi, Jake Fisher and Tyler Kroft to free agency this year. These players did not represent a great loss of salary or snaps, so they probably wouldn’t have landed any great picks for the Bengals.
The Bengals also signed John Miller, Kerry Wynn, and B.W. Webb, so they brought in roughly the same value that they lost.
Because of this, Zierlein projects the Bengals going into the 2020 draft without any compensatory picks.
The Lewis administration put a high value on these picks, and were fairly inactive during free agency in order to land them. Taylor appears to not value them the same way, and signed several free agents who could potentially get a lot of playing time in 2019.
With the compensatory picks in 2019, the Bengals included one of them in a trade to move up for OL Michael Jordan and used their remaining two to take LB Deshaun Davis and RB Rodney Anderson. Other notable player taken with compensatory picks include CB Darius Phillips, WR Auden Tate, and DL Ryan Glasgow,