The Giants could get a 4th round comp pick in 2025, per OverTheCap

Giants fans should be rooting for Ben Bredeson

The New York Giants are in line to get a fourth round compensatory pick in the 2025 NFL Draft, according to Nick Korte of OverTheCap.

The Giants’ compensatory pick would be for the loss of Xavier McKinney, who signed a 4-year, $68 million contract with the Green Bay Packers in free agency.

OverTheCap

(Note 1: This only a projection. We won’t know for certain until the NFL officially announces comp picks after the 2024 season.)

OTC currently projects that there will be three third round comp picks, as well as four comp picks in the fourth round. If their projections hold true, the Giants’ comp pick would be somewhere between 132 and 135th overall.

Those picks turned into,

• S/RB Sione Vaki
• S Jaden Hicks
• RB Braelon Allen
• WR Jacob Cowing

So while those aren’t premium picks, teams can still find potentially useful players there.

Korte notes that the Giants getting a fourth round pick and not a 7th round pick is a “close call”. The Giants’ pick could be contingent on Ben Bredeson winning a starting job with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

The Giants have a 4th rounder on the board for Xavier McKinney leaving for Green Bay, but that is contingent on Ben Bredeson qualifying as a CFA.

(Note 2: CFA means “Compensatory Free Agent”, that is, a player who counts for the NFL’s compensatory pick formula)

This could be complicated by the Bucs also drafting Graham Barton in the 1st round, should Barton displace Bredeson as a possible starter at guard, instead of Robert Hainsey at center. The Giants and their fans should be rooting for Bredeson to win a starting job. If Bredeson’s contract does not qualify, the 4th rounder gets demoted to a net value 7th rounder placed at the very bottom of the list.

Fans will likely wonder why the Giants aren’t getting compensation for losing Saquon Barkley in free agency. However, OverTheCap projects that his contract will be canceled out in the formula by the signing of guard Jon Runyan Jr.

If fans are looking for a reason to criticize the Giants’ front office, the decisions regarding Barkley would be their opportunity to do so. The team traded iDL Leonard Williams at the trade deadline, netting the second round pick that they used to draft S Tyler Nubin, but refrained from trading Saquon Barkley.

We’ve heard a couple times now that the Giants didn’t make Barkley an offer after the season and freely let him depart. The Giants might not have been able to find the value they wanted for Barkley, but moving him during the season would have allowed them to get something for him. It could also have prevented him from going to the Philadelphia Eagles, though there’s no guarantee of that.

The flip side of that coin is that Barkley’s leadership and public support of Tommy DeVito very well may have been the glue that held the locker room together through the turbulent middle of the season. Had the Giants traded Barkley, we might have seen a full-scale collapse and perhaps even a fractured locker room. We’ve seen similar circumstances lead to the downfall of Ben McAdoo, Pat Shurmur, and Joe Judge, so perhaps what Schoen and Daboll got for not trading Barkley was a reprieve from the hot seat.

Elsewhere in the NFC East, the Dallas Cowboys are the only team (currently) projected to get compensatory picks. Over The Cap projects that Dallas will get three 5th round selections for the losses of Tyron Smith, Tyler Biadasz, and Dorance Armstrong Jr, as well as a sixth round selection for Tony Pollard.