Has anybody actually put pen to paper? Everybody wants to talk about the Gila. Alrighty then, let's look at two known units, 16A and 16D (please don't bust my chops for unit #'s it is not applicable). Guess how many bull tags (rifle bull or either sex archery) land owner tags from the most recently NMDGF available list (primary zone)? A whopping 20 and 39, respectively. Let's not forget that us residents get 84% of those, outfitter pool 10% and non res DIY get 6%. So, throw out 16A and D from this discussion, as you guys are too way proud to use an outfitter, that means you missed out on 1 bull tag in A and 2 in D (residents get the tag on rounding). Do you really think your app was one away from being the next non-resident to get their app pulled? If so, you should zip it because it means your 2nd choice got drawn (if you halfway put some thought into the draw process). More reference...it looks like your pool drew 51 bull tags in 16A through the draw per the most recent draw statistics. Sweet, you just increased your available tags by 2%.
Your next argument ought to be "Well, CPA dork you are only cherry picking units that have high amounts of public land. It's not apples to apples with high volumes of private land." Well, let's look at a neighboring unit that has more, unit 15. 382 bull tags doled out to the greedy landowners, roughly split 50/50 between unit wide and ranch only tags (note one lucky bastard ranch gets 100 RO only tags alone). Your share of those tags if they went into the draw is 22. There are 1,295 bull tags allocated through the draw, your share is 77. I have no idea how much public vs. private there is in 15, but from looking at onx it looks to be about one third private and I'm sure there is quite a bit more that would be effectively landlocked (without killing yourself). You thought Colorado over the counter was bad, drawing a unit 15 tag will be worse by moving all those LO tags into the draw. And where do you think all those elk are going to go? That's right...to that one lucky bastard's ranch that used to get 100 tags.