After two forgettable and unproductive seasons, Reese was dealt away to the Los Angeles Rams in exchange for a lowly 12th-round draft pick and by 1985 he had washed out of the league altogether in a haze of underachievement and drug use. But the specter of Reese and the trade that brought him to Tampa Bay lingered far longer, haunting the franchise for years to come.

The Bucs call a draft-day (in)audible, via speaker phone

Coming off their second NFC Central championship in three years in 1981, the John McKay-coached Bucs entered the 1982 draft with the certainty that they were building a program with a decent shot to be a perennial winner. With the 17th pick of the first round that year, the Bucs chose Penn State guard Sean Farrell, a highly regarded prospect and future Pro Bowl selection who would go on to play 11 years in the league for four different teams. They just didn’t mean to. At least not at No. 17.

Sporting News Archives/Sporting News/Getty Images

Tampa Bay’s first-round decision came down to either Farrell—a linemate of fellow Penn State guard Mike Munchak, who went 8th overall to Houston in 1982—or Reese, a raw but promising 6-6, 260-pound defensive end from Bethune-Cookman College, a small, predominantly black school in Daytona Beach, Fla. Farrell was far more polished and pro-ready, but Reese had freakish athletic skills, especially as a pass rusher, and the Bucs defense for a couple of years had been seeking someone to successfully man left end, opposite future Hall of Famer Lee Roy Selmon at right end. Tampa Bay’s coaches and personnel men had worked Reese out and were fairly well smitten by his 4.68 in the 40-yard dash.

As the Bucs’ time on the clock in the first round approached, Herock says, he called veteran Tampa Bay equipment manager Pat Marcuccillo—who was given the plum and presumably easy job of representing the team at the draft in New York—and told him to write down two names, Farrell and Reese, and to stay tuned. Meanwhile back in Tampa, the debate continued in the Bucs’ draft room, and eventually the clock wound down to about a minute remaining in the team’s 15-minute first-round window.

There was no noise, only stunned silence at first in the Bucs’ war room when Rozelle called out Farrell’s name on ESPN—in only its third year of televising the draft—and then a whole lot of angry shouting. Says Herock of the reaction, “There was a lot of cussing.”

That’s when the Bucs’ best-laid first-round plans were apparently foiled by a pair of speaker phones and some background noise from rowdy fans in the league’s draft headquarters at the New York City Sheraton Hotel, where the draft was conducted in those years.

“The communication we had then, today you would consider it archaic,’’ Herock says of the speaker phones that both he and Marcuccillo were using that day. “We were on the phone, but it was hard to hear. I’m hearing Pat say, ‘Quiet, quiet, quiet, I can’t hear what he’s saying.’ And I can hear a lot of noise on the other end, in the background in New York. We were close to our time, but we always let it ride until the last 30 seconds or so and then we’d turn the pick in.

“We thought we needed both of those players, but after we mulled it over and discussed it, the selection was to go with Booker Reese. So I told Pat, I said, ‘Listen, Pat, you’ve got two names there.’ I said ‘We’re not going with Sean Farrell, we’re going with Booker Reese. Turn it in.’ But he didn’t hear the Booker Reese part of it because of the noise. He took it that we were going with Sean Farrell and turned it in.’’

There was no noise, only stunned silence at first in the Bucs’ war room when Rozelle called out Farrell’s name on ESPN—in only its third year of televising the draft—and then a whole lot of angry shouting as the reality set in.

“After we turned in the pick, we’re watching a minute later on television and we find out we had selected Sean Farrell,’’ says Herock, laughing at the memory. “There was a lot of cussing, like, you know, ‘What the hell’s he doing? What’s going on here?’ That kind of stuff. But there was nothing you could do. That’s the name that was turned in, and they went with the name that was turned in. That’s the way the selection process went.’’

But actually, the Bucs didn’t just throw up their hands and accept their mistake as their fate. Unbelievably, Herock instructed Marcuccillo to get up and head for the podium to aggressively plead Tampa Bay’s case for reversal. That’s right, the Bucs tried to rescind the pick, likely establishing another first in NFL draft history.

The Booker Reese File Born: Sept. 20, 1959 in Jacksonville, Fla.

Lives: Unknown

College: Bethune-Cookman

Position: Defensive End

Height: 6-6, Weight: 260

Drafted: 2nd round, pick 32, 1982

NFL/WireImage.com

Named ‘Black College Player of the Year’ in 1981

Lasted only four seasons in the NFL

Made 24 career appearances with Buccaneers

Traded to Rams in 1984 for a 12th-round draft pick

Signed with 49ers in 1985. Released before season after failing drug test

Recorded two career sacks and two interceptions

Convicted of cocaine possession in 1999

“We told him, ‘Listen, Pat, you turned in the wrong name,’ ’’ Herock says. “Get up there and get the thing changed, okay?’ But the league said once the name is turned in, you’re done, that’s it.’’

Joe Browne, the veteran NFL public relations official and current Senior Advisor to the Commissioner, remembers someone at the Bucs’ table at draft headquarters informing members of the league’s personnel staff that the team had somehow selected the wrong player. Browne says that piece of startling news came long after the announcement of Tampa Bay’s pick, and maybe even as late as after a couple other picks by other teams had been made and announced.

As Browne wrote in an email to SI.com: “The decision was made by our executive team at that point that we could not put the genie back in the bottle, so the draft....and life....went on. I’m pretty sure [Bucs owner Hugh] Culverhouse then called Pete [Rozelle]. Mr. C pleaded his case, but Pete knew at that point there were no do-overs.’’

Former Bucs director of public relations Rick Odioso, then the team’s assistant PR director, blames some raucous Giants fans in New York for the botched communication in 1982’s first round. Odioso was in the Bucs’ war room and his first-hand account starts with the reminder that the Giants held the No. 18 pick that year, just after Tampa Bay’s, and that in great draft tradition, the New York partisans were screaming for their team to make a selection even as the Bucs’ time on the clock was winding down. New York wound up taking Michigan running back Butch Woolfolk at 18.

“I was sitting back just observing that day, but I may more than anybody else know exactly what went wrong,’’ says Odioso, who remained with the organization well into the ’90s. “Those speaker phones we used back in those days basically only worked one way at time, kind of like walkie-talkies. You couldn’t have people speaking at the same time back and forth, you had to grab control of the speaker’s phone signal when it was your turn to speak.’’

Odioso doesn’t recall hearing Herock give Marcuccillo the names of both Farrell and Reese to write down as the Bucs’ pick approached, when the background noise wasn’t yet a factor, only that of Farrell.

“So we’re on the clock, and we’re thinking about it, and thinking about it, and thinking about it, and as that was happening, people in New York start screaming for the Giants to make a pick,’’ Odioso says. “I believe the noise from the Giants fans grabbed control of the speaker phone signal and blocked out some of what Tampa was trying to say to Pat. So now it’s getting late and Kenny finally said, ‘Pat, Booker Reese, defensive end, Bethune-Cookman,’ and then he said ‘Turn it in.’ But I’m of the mind that the only thing that got through to Pat was ‘Turn it in,’ and the only card he had prepared was Sean Farrell’s.’’

By all accounts, Marcuccillo was shaken and horrified over his role in the mistaken pick, and made a desperate and impassioned case to the NFL officials to un-do it.

“Oh, he was almost crying because he was so upset that he did the wrong thing,’’ Herock says. “I eventually said, ‘Pat, don’t worry about it, man. That’s the way it goes. It happened. We got a good player in Farrell. Pat wasn’t the cause of what happened. The cause was the communications. If we had the kind of communications we have today, it would have never happened that way.’’

Though Herock said Culverhouse remained calm in the team’s draft room in the immediate aftermath of the Farrell pick, at least one media report in subsequent years claimed the Bucs aging owner angrily blurted out: “If this ever gets out of this room, you’re all fired!’’

Herock calls that quote “a bunch of baloney,’’ because “you knew something like that would leave the room.’’ Odioso recalls Culverhouse saying something to the effect of: “This can’t leave the room,’’ with or without a threat attached, but hastens to add that that ship had already sailed for the out-of-luck Bucs.

“You can imagine the reaction in the room, because it was not who we wanted,’’ Odioso says. “But in my opinion, whatever Mr. Culverhouse wanted to accomplish was pretty much defeated when they had Pat try to take the pick back. Once they did that, word quickly spread around New York of what had happened. It was out in New York among people who had no interest in keeping it quiet. I don’t know if it’s ever happened before or since where a team has turned in a pick and then tried to take it back. Is there a precedent for that?

“I don’t know if it’s ever ever happened before or since where a team has turned in a pick and then tried to take it back,” Odioso says. “Is there a precedent for that? Mr. Culverhouse in essence was trying to lock the barn door after the horse was stolen.”

“If they had said, ‘Okay, Pat, that’s our little secret and we’re going to go forward with Sean Farrell,’ then maybe it had a chance of staying a secret. But we had Pat go up and try to rescind the pick. So I was of the mind that it had already left the room when that happened. Mr. Culverhouse in essence was trying to lock the barn door after the horse was stolen.’’

Why the Bucs’ experienced a late, on-the-clock change of heart away from Farrell and in Reese’s direction within the team’s draft room has remained largely a mystery for more than three decades. But one previously reported rationale was debunked by everyone SI.com contacted for this story: That Tampa Bay assistant to the president and team negotiator Phil Krueger, a long-time member of the Bucs front office, was pushing for Reese, because he feared signability issues with Farrell being represented by high-profile agent Marvin Demoff. Reese was represented by little-known agent Ivery Black.

Contacted recently, Demoff said he had no pre-pick contact whatsoever with Tampa Bay regarding Farrell or his potential contract demands, and Herock said financial considerations held no sway in the decision to go with Reese.

“It had nothing to do with money,’’ Herock says. “And Krueger had no say in any of it. I was a good friend of Marvin Demoff’s and he had actually represented me in some of my negotiations. It had nothing to do with who the agents were. It was strictly a personnel decision. It wasn’t like these two players were something we were just grabbing at to grab at. They were very well scouted and very well touted and as it turned out, Sean Farrell was the better pick. And after the surprise wore off, I said, ‘Hey, let’s calm down. We got a good player. Let’s go on.’ ’’

The first-round draft mistake that foretold the future

Farrell was as stunned to learn that he had been taken 17th overall by the Bucs as were those members of the organization who lived through the shocking and bizarre turn of events in the team’s draft room. He had had only minimal contact with Tampa Bay officials in the pre-draft months and, once considered a potential top 10 pick, he didn’t think he’d still be on the board when the Bucs’ turn rolled around in the high teens.

The Sean Farrell File Born: May 25, 1960 in Southampton, N.Y.

Lives: Tampa, Fla.

College: Penn State

Position: Offensive guard

Height: 6-3, Weight: 260

Drafted: 1st round, pick 17, 1982

NFL/WireImage.com

Selected to All-America teams with Nittany Lions in 1980, ‘81

Played for Bucs from 1982-86, starting 59 games

Voted first-team NFL All-Pro by Sporting News in 1984

Traded to Patriots in ‘86 for three draft picks

Played for four NFL teams in 11-year career

Started 106 of his 123 career games

Currently is a director for Merrill Lynch

Sealing the deal, or so he thought, Farrell had received a phone call from Bucs offensive line coach Bill (Tiger) Johnson earlier in the first round, and the gist of the conversation was that Tampa Bay would not be addressing its offensive line needs with its No. 1 pick.

“It was one of the first few years that they actually had the draft on TV as I recall, and I was sitting at home watching the thing, and then Tiger Johnson called me,’’ says Farrell, who still lives in the Tampa Bay area and is the director of a Merrill Lynch complex in Tampa. “We talked for a couple minutes and then he said, ‘Well, it looks like we’re going to go in a different direction. We’d love to have had you, but best of luck,’ and he was gone.

“Then I’m sitting there watching this like the rest of America, and now I’m thinking I have a pretty good chance of going home, to the Giants at No. 18, because I knew they needed offensive line help [Farrell grew up in Southampton, N.Y.]. And no sooner did I think that then all of a sudden they announce my name to Tampa Bay. I was absolutely dumbfounded.’’

And it didn’t take Farrell long to discover most of the unique back story to his selection, learning he was in reality the Bucs’ second choice for their first choice. Farrell was a very solid starter who gave Tampa Bay five quality seasons at guard, but the team’s losing ways and minor-league-type operations in the upper reaches of the team’s front office drove him crazy throughout his Bucs tenure. In retrospect, his draft-day experience was a harbinger of the dysfunction and bumbling to come.

“It speaks to all of what I experienced over those five years,’’ says Farrell, who also played for New England, Denver and Seattle. “Every bit of it. That’s exactly the way it went consistently for five years. And it had nothing to do with the coaching staff. I should have known that day. I mean, if you’ve been in a conversation with somebody and they wished you good luck, with pleasantries and calling it a day, you’d have to figure out what the heck happened when you ended up going there.’’

Farrell said he never learned the Bucs had tried gamely to take his selection back but got nowhere with the NFL. But when informed of that development, he didn’t sound the least bit surprised.

“When something goes that awry, it makes you wonder what’s going on,” Farrell says. “The organization was just so upside down.” In December 1986, Farrell unloaded on his own club, saying, “I know what I want for Christmas. I want to get the hell out of Tampa Bay.”

“When something goes that awry, it makes you wonder what’s going on?’’ Farrell says. “Even the fact that it was Pat, the team’s equipment manager, there at the draft, putting in the picks. That kind of puts it into perspective for you. Your equipment manager’s not really in the in crowd. But it was his job to get the names to the podium, and the only pick he knew was viable was me, so he put my name in. It was like that with the Bucs. The organization was just so upside down. Things like this were commonplace.’’

So commonplace that as he was nearing the end of his Tampa Bay tenure, Farrell famously appeared before an Orlando-based Bucs booster in December 1986 and unloaded on his own organization.