oldhawkfan":ee1qm5ux said:
One does not build a roster on the hope of future compensatory draft picks. By the end of the 2019 draft I fully expect them to have drafted at least 7 players. It’s what JS/PC do. Accumulate additional picks.
The Patriots do this every single year. Actually they are even far more aggressive in stockpiling comp picks than that.
1. They sign a lot of roster cut players (street free agents or Unqualified Free agents) during camp or during the season. Allowing them to get signed in the next offseason and bolster their comp pick allotment
2. They trade away own players in their last year. This usually nets them picks in the immediate offseason. Not necessarily a comp pick strategy, but the end result is the same -- letting players go for future draft picks.
3. Trading for guys in their last year of their contracts. Usually they do position swaps (trade down) but instead of getting 2 picks, they just get one, with a player. Similar tactic we used to get Chris Clemons and Leon Washington in PCJS' first offseason. New England's starting LT Trent Brown is one of these and will surely end up netting them another 4th round selection in 2020.
So yes, one can build a roster based on comp pick strategy and do it at the highest level year after year. It's not exactly rocket science. But it takes a lot of discipline. And a roster building strategy that overall doesn't really draft against what's on the roster. But more to the point, builds for the roster two years down the road. Assuming guys they draft will succeed players already entrenched on their roster.
They draft with the idea that their roster is always broken. Because they intentionally break it up year after year. How they break it up is determined by what guys they selected a year or two prior.
It's even easier, and wiser, to build a roster with a robust comp pick component today. Given now that these picks are tradeable. Not only for moving up. But also for plowing into next year.
Looking at the qualified UFAs we signed and retained this year, other than Mingo, I'm not sure any one of those guys was appreciably more important or valuable to us than a cap casualty stopgap player would have been.
Seattle is a team that inherently cannot leverage comp picks to their full potential. For several reasons:
1. John Schneider is philosophically opposed to trading today's picks for next year's picks. He simply doesn't do that. And he admitted early on in his tenure that he doesn't like trading a known commodity (current year pick) for an unknown (what's available next year).
2. Seattle drafts against their current roster. In so doing, the natural and expected byproduct will be that we will take worse players than is currently on the board at other positions where we have strength because we have acute need elsewhere.
Seattle is rarely in a position to let our good players go because we build into the roster a limited or non existent pool of talent behind our starters. This has borne out basically since 2013, when our 'plug holes' strategy predictably helped in sapping our teams ability to build depth (I'd say it went hand in hand with essentially burning a dozen or so draft picks on bad Cable OL picks). And while we did admirably plan for life after Sherman by drafting Griffin -- it's worth noting that we openly tried to offload Sherman in 2017. Before we'd drafted Griffin. The decision to move on from Sherman was already cemented before we had a successor in place.
Of course we can't ignore the benefits either. In this case we have these players for their final year. That inherently has value. And it's assuredly not appreciated after the contract is up and they leave.
Bottom line, is that there is more than one way to build a roster. Seattle isn't unlike many teams that like to add a lot of players year after year. We do it by trading draft capital at the top of the draft to acquire additional picks. Other teams let guys go and get picks essentially 22 months down the road. The end goal is to pick 9-10 times a year.