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All eyes are on the NFL Combine this week, with the overwhelming majority of front office personnel, members of coaching staffs and media members in Indianapolis. However, even with fans preparing to tune in to watch the players perform starting this evening, the CBA proposal that has been put on the table by the owners is still managing to stay in the news cycle. The big report Thursday about the proposed new CBA is how the agreement would significantly change the way certain free agents count in the calculation of comp picks.
An interesting aspect of the proposed CBA that NFL players will vote on: The compensatory pick calculation would be revised to exclude many “core veterans,” including those who sign 1-year deals making less than $1.75 million. The hope is it allows players to sign more quickly.
— Tom Pelissero (@TomPelissero) February 27, 2020
So, while fans of the Seattle Seahawks have been wringing their hands about the signing of free agents such as D.J. Fluker and Jaron Brown in the spring of 2018 that prevented the Hawks from being awarded any comp picks in the 2019 NFL Draft, things could change. Under the proposed rule, the one-year, $1.5M contract Fluker signed in 2018 would not have counted in the computations, however, Seattle still would not have received any comp picks in 2019 because the net loss rule would have applied.
In any case, the CBA laying out the specifics of the comp pick process would be big, as it has been largely a black box process that experts, such as Nick Korte of OverTheCap.com have had to reverse engineer through trial and error over the years. So, while the CBA has been put to the players to vote on, it appears as though the NFL is working to continue leaking ways in which the new CBA would benefit the players not on blockbuster contracts like Russell Wilson and Aaron Rodgers who have come out in opposition to the deal.