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A year after the New Orleans Saints received three additional selections in the 2021 NFL draft, they’re predicted to do so again. The analysts at Over The Cap have come closest to cracking the NFL’s tightly-guarded code for determining comp picks, and after correctly forecasting the team would be awarded 2021 draft picks in the third round (for Teddy Bridgewater) and the sixth round (for A.J. Klein), they’re projecting a continued trend for the Saints in 2022.
Right now, OTC projects the Saints to receive a fourth rounder for Trey Hendrickson and a sixth rounder for Sheldon Rankins — in addition to the third round comp pick the Saints have already earned for Terry Fontenot in the NFL’s incentivized minority hiring policy. A handful of other teams are predicted to receive three comp picks each, while the Rams (five) and Chargers (four) pace the NFL.
In past years, Hendrickson’s $15 million per-year contract would have been a sure third round comp pick for the Saints. But that new incentives policy guarantees third-round compensation for teams who lose a minority candidate to a head coach or general manager role on another team, which pushes highly-valued contracts like Hendrickson’s down below the threshold and into the fourth round. It’s the difference between picking at No. 105 and waiting until No. 142 to make your selection.
Still, the Saints are direct beneficiaries of this policy so we can’t complain. And creating greater diversity in leadership roles across the league, better representing the population of players who are subject to their decisions, is a worthy cause deserving of those incentives. And, hey, remember: this is only a projection. Maybe the Saints end up getting a better pick for Hendrickson after all.
Last year, New Orleans used all of its compensatory draft picks to pad out trade packages while moving up the board to target specific players. They put the third rounders for Fontenot and Bridgewater together so they could leapfrog 22 spots and go get Paulson Adebo, who is competing to start Week 1.
The Saints then packaged the sixth rounder for Klein with a seventh round pick acquired from the Jaguars (for nose tackle Malcom Brown) so they could vault a dozen spots up the board, landing left tackle Landon Young — who was their highest-graded rookie in preseason, per Pro Football Focus. Even if the Saints didn’t remain in place and use all of their picks on different players, the draft-day versatility that extra ammo creates speaks for itself.
So is this signaling a philosophy shift in how the team approaches free agency and the draft? Or was this two-year trend more based in the logistics issues of struggling to keep a talented team together during a salary cap-shattering pandemic? Will the Saints get back to cooking the books once the cap recovers and goes to the moon in 2023, thanks to an influx of revenue from new broadcasting deals?
I’m guessing it’s a little of both. Even with the salary cap bouncing back two years from now, the Saints won’t be able to re-sign all of their priciest free agents — the 2022 class includes defensive cornerstones Marshon Lattimore and Marcus Williams, franchise left tackle Terron Armstead, and quarterbacks Jameis Winston and Taysom Hill. If any of them are signed by another team, the Saints should be poised to net another comp pick in 2023.
For the curious, here are the current list of Saints draft picks in 2022 (their initial sixth rounder was forfeited by the NFL for COVID-19 protocol violations last year):
- Round 1
- Round 2
- Round 3
- Round 3 comp (Fontenot)
- Round 4
- Round 4 comp (Hendrickson)
- Round 5
- Round 6 comp (Rankins)
- Round 7
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