We don’t know for sure if Pittsburgh Steelers rookie CB Joey Porter Jr. will be suiting up to play on Sunday, officially listed as questionable on the final injury report. Chances are good that he will, however, and if he does, he could be chatting up the refs before the game.
That’s what Uncle Ike did. That would be Ike Taylor, who was teammates with his father, Joey Porter Sr., with the Steelers of the previous generation. While he didn’t teach Porter the importance of cozying up to the officials, however, he praised “the rookie with a vet move”.
“That’s what I’m talking about right there”, he told Randy Baumann on the DVE Morning Show this week. “You already know who you need to be friends with. That’s me all day. I used to go talk to the refs before the game, in warmups or something. They’d be like, ’24, what kind of day is it gonna be?’. I’d be like, ‘What kind of day y’all want it to be?’”.
So far during the regular season, Porter has not been penalized across 139 snaps of action, the vast majority of which has seen him lining up in coverage. A number of times he has been right up in the mix with a wide receiver and has escaped a flag accordingly.
His moment of truth, so to speak, came in the second game of the season against the Cleveland Browns. Having already had a pass defensed on a third down earlier in the day, he was targeted on the pivotal 4th-and-9 play that sealed the game. QB Deshaun Watson was looking or WR Donovan Peoples-Jones, but Porter played him against the sideline—not without contact—and helped force the incompletion.
did he have a nice little chat with the officials beforehand? In all honesty, I wouldn’t be surprised. He has been around the game his entire life, and I’m sure he’s learned a thing or two from his father and the Steelers crew from that era, Taylor included. If not, he’s probably getting some advice now as his role increases.
“I was like, ‘Man, let’s keep it clean, clean-cut day’. Then after I hit ‘em with that, you know, ‘How’s your family doing, Mr. Ref? Anything you need? What state do you stay in?”, Taylor said of his conversations with the officials. “If I feel like they gave me a bad call, I look at Mr. So-and-So or whoever and they let me slide with one or two, and I bet that’s them good pre-game conversations we had. But JP Jr., he done figured it out already”.
Porter played a career-high 53 snaps last Sunday against the Los Angeles Rams. While his tackling issues did come up, he continued to show that he can play in coverage at the NFL level, registering another pass defensed and playing tight on other incompletions.
Assuming he plays, we should expect to see him get a similar workload. And we can hope to continue to see him play penalty-free—whether that’s a product of his continually improving his technique or improving his relationships with the officials. Whatever keeps the laundry in the pockets works for me.
