The Worst Buccaneers’ First-Round Draft Pick

It’s the offseason and I need Buccaneers’ stuff to talk about. My head coach hasn’t had a midnight rendezvous with Kay Adams and our WRs aren’t stupid enough to smoke while on probation. So, let’s talk about some ancient history.

Now, let’s be brutally honest here, there is basically one answer when talking about worst first round pick for us. It’s Bo Jackson. He’s also consistently named the worst pick overall by the team as well. It’s hard to top a guy who told the GM he wouldn’t play for your team and make through on that promise. But that’s boring. I would prefer to talk about a guy who took snaps (for this team). New Bucs fans would point to JTS or even Jameis. While both are disappointments for where they were taken (especially Winston), neither are bad enough I don’t think to qualify here. So, for my money, I’m going with Eric Curry.

Curry was a highly touted prospect coming out of Bama. He would have to put on weight to truly make it in the pros (he weighed a svelte 220 coming into the draft), but the potential was immense. Tampa was not deterred by his weight and made him the 6th overall pick in 1993. Bad bad move.

He just didn’t pan out. The most sacks he could get in a season was his rookie year with 5. Which, for a rookie, could maybe be acceptable. He did only play and start 10 games that year, so in that context it wasn’t the worst. But 5 sacks as a career high for a defensive end is completely unacceptable. He went from five to three next year to two the next two years. Rich McKay and Monte Kiffin basically both said he was struggling way too much. They tried to move him from right to left to see if that would spark something. But if your defensive coordinator publicly says that other guys are outplaying you, it might be over. He only started three games in 1996 out of 12 games played. Curry would be cut after 1997 and would never start for another team.

As far as who the Bucs could’ve had, well… it’s not pretty. If they wanted to address the same position, there was a guy available to them by the name of Michael Strahan. To give them some credit, it’s not as if they were the only team to pass on Strahan as he made it all the way to pick 40. Even still, it hurts to see him have more years where he had more sacks than Curry had his entire career for more years than Curry was in the league. However, the Bucs do get some credit for this draft for basically one reason. They managed to snag John Lynch here. Lynch may be a below average GM, he was a fantastic safety.