Tampa Bay Buccaneers General Manager Jason Licht knows how to multiply his draft assets, as he did during seven eventful rounds in 2018. Now he knows the exact numbers he can plug into those equations.
On Tuesday, the NFL made its annual announcement of the compensatory picks that have been added to the draft, the result of a system designed to compensate teams for net losses in the previous year's free agency period. The Buccaneers got a fourth-round compensatory pick this year, their highest added selection in nearly 20 years.
That's good news, of course, but the other benefit of the compensatory pick announcement is that it completely finalizes the draft order. The added picks start after the third round, so the specific draft spots of Rounds 4-7 weren't known until Tuesday.
Tampa Bay now has seven picks heading into April's draft, with two in the fourth round and none in the seventh. They already knew they had picks 14, 45 and 76 in the first three stanzas, but now their other four picks are finalized as well. They are:
• Round 1: 14
• Round 2: 45
• Round 3: 76
• Round 4: 117
• Round 4 (compensatory): 139
• Round 5: 161
• Round 6: 194
The Buccaneers were one of six teams that finished the 2019 season with a 7-9 record, and the next year's draft is based on the final standings. Any teams in tied "segments" are then ordered by a strength-of-schedule tiebreaker. The six teams tied at 7-9 were due to pick between numbers 11 and 16, and Tampa Bay ended up with the 14th pick. In subsequent rounds, those six teams rotate up through the order, with the team picking 11th dropping back to 16th in the round.
Thus, the Bucs were due to pick 13th in Round Two, 12th in Round Three, 11th in Round Four, 16th in Round Five and 15th in Round Six. Tampa Bay doesn't own a seventh-round pick in the 2020 draft as it was included in last year's trade of wide receiver DeSean Jackson to Philadelphia.
There were 10 compensatory picks added at the end of Round Three, so the 11th pick in the fourth round went from number 107 to 117. And so on. Tampa Bay's compensatory pick at the end of Round Four, the first of eight added in that spot, is number 139 overall.
The Buccaneers will actually make the 15th pick in Round Five, not the 16th, because Arizona used a fifth-round pick on safety Jalen Thompson in last summer's supplemental draft. That means the Cardinals forfeit their fifth-round pick in this year's draft. The resulting math puts Tampa Bay's fifth-rounder at number 161.
