The Pittsburgh Steelers could very well find out Monday at the NFL owners’ meetings in Orlando, FL just how many compensatory draft picks they will have for the upcoming 2014 NFL Draft, but as of Sunday, general manager Kevin Colbert still isn’t quite sure how many to expect.
According to Mike Prisuta of DVE Radio, Colbert told him on Sunday that his guess is that the team will receive a “significant pick” as compensation for the loss of wide receiver Mike Wallace last offseason and potentially a fourth-round pick for cornerback Keenan Lewis.
“It’s a real complicated formula based on net free agents lost versus gained, the money that was spent and then all their production put together,” Colbert explained. “We try to predict it but actually we’ve gotten more picks than I’ve predicted in the past.
“We’ll find out (on the compensatory picks) I guess on Tuesday or Wednesday. I don’t know (exactly) when.”
If the league follows the same schedule as they did last year at this same time, we all should find out what the compensatory picks are on Monday, but that’s not set in stone.
Colbert is right to expect a third round pick for Wallace, but outside of that it becomes unclear as to whether or not the loss of Lewis last offseason will return a fourth or fifth round pick. In addition, there’s an outside chance that the loss of Ryan Mundy might produce a seventh-round pick.
The league has never released the formula used for determining compensatory draft picks, but we do know one thing and that’s that the new CBA only allows for a total of 32 compensatory picks at most to be handed out. Last year there were exactly 32 that were awarded to 16 teams with the Steelers receiving just one.
