The compensatory pick system was good to the Patriots this year and likely will be next year as well.

New England is likely to get two third-round compensatory picks in 2020, thanks to Trent Brown getting a huge deal from the Raiders and Trey Flowers being expected to get a huge deal of his own.

The original idea behind compensatory picks was to help maintain parity in the NFL, giving additional picks to teams that lost high-priced free agents to other teams, so that small-market teams wouldn’t fall behind big-market teams that could out-bid them for players.

But in the years since the NFL started awarding compensatory picks, they’ve actually helped the best teams stay on top. That’s because the NFL, with its salary cap and revenue sharing, doesn’t have the same issues with big-market teams out-bidding small-market teams that have been problems in other sports leagues. So compensatory picks don’t go to the have-nots as compensation for losing key players to the haves.

Instead, compensatory picks go to the teams that were already good, and had such an abundance of good players that some of them signed high-priced contracts elsewhere. Teams like the Patriots. One more reason New England stays on top.