2020 NFL Draft: Compensatory Picks announced, Vikings receive three extra selections

It came a couple of weeks later than usual, but the National Football League has announced the distribution of the Compensatory Draft picks for teams that had significant personnel losses from 2018 to 2019.

The Minnesota Vikings will be receiving three extra selections. . .and, in a pleasant surprise, one of those extra selections will come on the second day of the 2020 NFL Draft.

Here are the Compensatory Picks that the Vikings received:

• Round 3, #105 overall (loss of Sheldon Richardson)
• Round 7, #249 overall (loss of Trevor Siemian)
• Round 7, #253 overall (loss of Tom Compton)

Yes, after our friends from Over the Cap projected that the Vikings would receive a fourth-round pick for losing Richardson, the NFL decided to bestow a third-round pick on them after all. That pick currently stands as the second-to-last pick of the third round.

That’s a pretty significant difference in draft position. The fourth-round compensatory picks start at #139 overall, so the Vikings getting a third-round pick means a difference of 34 spots worth of draft position. That third-round pick has significantly more trade value than a fourth-round selection would, too.

With that, the Vikings now have Rick Spielman’s “magic number” of 10 selections in this year’s NFL Draft. We’ll do a separate post to run down which picks those are, and we’ll also have to update the Mock Draft Database to reflect the Vikings now having four picks in the first three rounds.

What do you think, folks?