NFL · 1 hour ago

“If it gets done, it gets done. If it don’t, it don’t.” – Steelers Joey Porter Jr. on Contract Extension

Bo Marchionte

Host · Writer

Steelers Joey Porter Jr. Isn’t Shying Away From The Obvious

“If it gets done, it gets done. If it don’t, it don’t.”

Joey Porter Jr. didn’t dress up the answer. Didn’t attach a deadline to it. Didn’t offer some carefully packaged hint that everybody could spend the next 24 hours dissecting.

After an extremely hot and humid practice on the South Side of Pittsburgh, Porter spoke for the first time as he enters his fourth NFL season with one rather large piece of business still unfinished.

A new contract.

And apparently, Porter isn’t interested in staring at the clock.

“No, not really,” Porter Jr. said when asked if he expected a new deal to be finalized by now. “I never really put a time date on it. I mean, this business, things carry out a long time. I know T.J. (Watt) went through this. Cam Heyward been through this as well, so I never really had a clock on it.”

That’s an interesting pair of names to keep around mentally.

Watt has lived through the contract circus. Heyward has lived through it. Porter has been inside the Steelers organization long enough to understand that negotiations can stretch from background noise into the biggest story in the building without much warning.

No Timeline but Time is Ticking Away

So, Porter refuses to manufacture a deadline.

There is, however, one already sitting on the calendar.

Week 1.

The Atlanta Falcons come to Pittsburgh for the Steelers’ home opener, which produced the simplest and perhaps most important question of the afternoon.

Is Joey Porter Jr. playing?

“I can’t read the future, I couldn’t even give that answer to be honest,” Porter Jr. politely replied.

And there it was.

Not a no.

Certainly not a yes.

Just the uncomfortable middle ground where player and organization can say all the proper things while September keeps getting closer.

A barrage of questions followed regarding essentially the same subject, only dressed in different clothes. Porter remained consistent. There was no public ultimatum hiding underneath his answers and no frustration boiling over.

But when the hypothetical changed, so did the conversation.

If the contract gets done, could Porter physically turn around and play against Atlanta?

That answer carried considerably less mystery.

“Yeah, I mean, I’m a ball player,” Porter Jr. said. “I’m an athlete. I don’t think that’d be a problem too much.”

That Might be Worth Circling

Porter doesn’t sound like a player worried about whether he can play football.

He sounds like a player waiting for the business of football to determine when he plays it.

There is a considerable difference.

Strip away the contract language, negotiating positions and inevitable speculation, and Porter gave little indication that football itself is the problem. He believes he can step onto the field and go.

The unresolved portion is everything happening before he gets there.

And Pittsburgh is approaching the point where this stops being merely a summer contract story.

Week 1 becomes Week 2.

Then September becomes October. Seventeen games and potentially the playoffs make for a hell of a long time for one of Pittsburgh’s most important defensive backs and the organization to remain standing on opposite sides of the contract fence.

If a long-term agreement never arrives, the questions only get bigger.

Is he traded away before Week 1? Dallas did it to Micah Parsons last year.

Does Pittsburgh eventually use the franchise tag?

Does Porter play out the season and force the issue deeper into the offseason?

Or, if the two sides discover their numbers simply live in different neighborhoods, does a trade eventually enter a conversation nobody currently wants to have?

Those are tomorrow’s questions.

Today, Porter offered something much simpler.

“If it gets done, it gets done. If it don’t, it don’t.”

That sounds wonderfully uncomplicated.

The situation surrounding it is anything but.

This must be continued written all over it.