Compensatory Picks

[Shake n Blake]

(09-05-2017, 01:22 PM)bengalfan74 Wrote: Us drafting well has been stretched quite a bit IMHO, as has resigning our own ! It sounds good to throw out there as more or less an excuse. But is it really happening ?

And the window for success is small by any measure. Many things factor in but by and large it's not very long. Knowing when and on whom to spend in FA is quite often one of the final keys to success.

The whole building for the future narrative that's been thrown around here in the past is more fantasy than not.

I think "draft well and sign your own" is the credo of every single team in the NFL. No team says to themselves "gee, we're going to ignore the draft, let our own good players walk, and constantly blow big wads of cash on free agents". People erroneously associate free agency with losers because losers will always spend more. Why? Because they typically have no good players of their own to worry about, hence more cash to throw around at free agents. 

So it isn't that using free agency leads to losing, it's that losing leads to spending in free agency to try and bridge the gap. Free agency is rarely ever a quick fix for a terrible team. 2-3 players aren't going to turn around a franchise in disarray. That said, plugging a very good player into a weakness on a contending team can often be the difference. All teams try to build through the draft though.