The Pittsburgh Steelers were lucky to have Joey Porter Jr. available to them at 32nd overall when they were selecting at the top of the second round earlier this year as one of the top cornerback prospects. But that’s not what he had in mind growing up—not at that position, anyway.
“It’s a crazy story. I didn’t want nothing to do with defense”, he said on the Richard Sherman podcast yesterday with the former All-Pro cornerback. “Nothing. I was a wide receiver. I thought I was gonna be the next Odell [Beckham Jr.] or something. I wanted to score”.
That might not be what you expect to hear from the son of one of the fiercest defensive players of his generation, but hey, who doesn’t want to score? You can’t blame him. And so he grew up playing wide receiver—until he attended a football camp in high school.
“The DB coach was like, ‘You’re not a wide receiver, you’re a DB’. I’m like, ‘Oh, shoot, I’m a DB, then let me play DB’”, he recalled after going through wide receiver drills. “I went back home, I told my dad I was switching positions. I hit up my close friend—my close friend’s dad was a DB coach, Sean McCaskill. I hit him up and I was like, I want to do defense. Ever since then, my junior year of high school, he’s been training me, and I just started getting offers”.
Porter switched positions when he transferred from North Catholic to North Allegheny. After establishing himself as a defender, he ultimately elected to declare for Penn State, where he developed into one of the top cornerback prospects in the nation. He hasn’t regretted the switch, needless to say.
Nor has he failed to heed the words of his father, Joey Porter Sr., who of course both played and coached for the Steelers. He played under Bill Cowher and coached under Mike Tomlin, the latter of whom is now his son’s coach, their sons being best friends.
But Dino Tomlin stuck with wide receiver. And I’m sure they went up against each other time and again during their school days. Porter, of course, also got to work against Antonio Brown when his father would bring him to training camp. Now he’s covering George Pickens. And dictating his fate, as Senior advised.
“He was like, when you go on the dark side, the defense, you could [dictate] your own game”, he said. “They’re not throwing to you? It’s a tackle game. If they [are], get your pick. It’s like, you dictate your outcome, and I want that in my hands, no question”.
Porter entered the starting lineup about midway through the season, though he’d had a sub-package role since the opener. Across 447 snaps, he has 29 tackles with one interception and six passes defensed. That interception just so happened to come while covering Beckham in the end zone.
If you can’t be them, beat them.
