The Vikings did not receive any compensatory draft picks this year.
The NFL on Friday afternoon revealed which teams have been awarded the 32 compensatory picks for April's draft. Unsurprisingly, the Vikings were not one of the 16 teams that received at least one bonus selection, which can now be traded for the first time in NFL history.
Which teams receive these comp picks is determined by a secret formula developed by the NFL Management Council that the NFL says is "based on salary, playing time and postseason honors." To simplify it, if you lose more quality free agents than you sign, you'll probably get at least one.
Last offseason, the Vikings signed guard Alex Boone to a four-year, $26.8 million deal and their most notable free-agent losses were defensive backs Josh Robinson and Robert Blanton, who signed modest deals to be backups elsewhere. So they weren't expecting a comp pick this year.
The Vikings have not been awarded a compensatory pick since 2012 and have received only 16 since this system was introduced in 1994. And as my colleague Mark Craig wrote a couple years ago, they have not done much with the compensatory picks they have scored over the years.
Of course, if you need a reminder of the good that can potentially come from these bonus picks, pull up the highlights from Super Bowl LI. The Patriots drafted Tom Brady with one of them back in 2000.
