Pittsburgh Steelers fans rightfully have been getting excited about their rookie class and what they’ve seen and heard, or read, about their performance thus far through about a week of training camp. Seemingly each of them has grown over the course of seven practices. It seems only fitting that their top defensive back, CB Joey Porter Jr., would help put an exclamation point on the final practice before Friday Night Lights, intercepting QB Kenny Pickett during a final two-minute drill for the first-team offense.
“Pickett looks for Cody White on a curl/comeback but Joey Porter – following instructions – doesn’t allow the sideline throw”, Alex Kozora describes in his camp diary of the play. “He drives on the ball and makes a great diving interception off Pickett. Great, great play, and the first-team defense wins here”.
It was the rookie’s second interception of the week, not insignificant given that he only recorded one during his entire college career at Penn State. So why the success now? “They try me a little bit more”, he said on Training Camp Live for the team’s website. “That’s what kind of changed a little bit. And also just really working on my skill, before and after practice”.
We’ve already seen the work that he puts in after practice, including getting some impromptu lessons from some really veteran cornerbacks. Teammate Patrick Peterson has been working with him a lot. Former great Ike Taylor, now a scout, has also worked with the man whose father, Joey Porter Sr., was once his teammate.
“I work on that drill basically every day before and after practice”, Porter said, describing the circumstances of the interception. “Coming back to the ball, finishing, toe-tapping outside. We were in a Cover-3 situation, it was scramble rules. I see the guy, he was looking down, and I just trusted my instincts and went after it, and I got my two feet in”.
Good instincts, of course, are the product of great study and repetition. You hone your instincts by learning and doing. It’s essentially the opposite of what we often describe young players as doing, namely thinking rather than reacting. When you can jump on a play knowing what to do without having to think about it, we start to give it the name, “instinct”, at least in this context.
Porter is already showing that. Indeed, he’s shown quite a bit already over seven training camp sessions, embracing the full repertoire of what he’ll be asked to do. He can hang down the field with speedsters. He’ll knock a pass away against a tall target in a fade situation. Come over the middle and he’ll follow you, right on your hip.
Couple that with a growing intimacy with the nuances of not just the particular defensive scheme in which he is asked to play but also of general defensive concepts and responses, and you have the makings of a very good player. It may not be long before we see these instincts ending a real two-minute drill in Acrisure Stadium, not just on Chuck Noll Field at Saint Vincent College.
