It now appears the Seahawks will have 12 picks in April’s draft. They have 10 now, and are likely to be awarded two compensatory picks because of free agents who left a year ago.

I need to make sure to give credit to the guys over at Blogging the Beast, who are the ones who have figured all this stuff out. It isn’t a simple algorithm, and required a lot of digging through contracts in order to get it right. Luckily, they have a good system and have been very accurate in the past, so I trust their work here.

The result is that the Seahawks mostly likely will be awarded two additional 7th round draft choices. One for Charlie Whitehurst, and the other for Atari Bigby. I had hoped that the Whitehurst contract would end up giving the Seahawks a 6th rounder pick, but it doesn’t appear it will.

The Seahawks lost other players, but those were “cancelled out” by players they signed. here’s the list:

Free Agents who left: Carlson (5 years, $25 million), Hawthorne (5 years, $19.5 million), Whitehurst (2 years, $4 million), Bigby (2 years, $2.5 million)

Free Agents signed: Flynn (3 years, $19.5 to 26.5 million), Jason Jones (1 year, $4.5 million)

The threshold level for getting a compensatory draft pick appears to be $890,000 in annual salary. Players who leave and signed a contract for less than that do not result in a pick being awarded.

Compensatory picks cannot be traded.