Mike McCarthy called the Joey Porter Jr. contract talks an impasse on Monday, and the word is doing a lot of quiet work for a situation only one side actually controls. The Pittsburgh Steelers activated Jalen Ramsey off the physically unable to perform list that same day, which meant the same front office refusing to negotiate with its own homegrown cornerback had time to activate a Pro Bowler whose first act back was lobbying for that cornerback’s raise. “So we’re at an impasse right here, and you’ve got to respect that,” McCarthy told reporters. Nobody asked the obvious follow-up: an impasse implies two sides pushing against each other; only one side here is allowed to negotiate at all, and that side wrote the rule.
The rule is simple: the Steelers don’t negotiate contracts once the regular season starts. That’s organizational policy, not law, and McCarthy framed it as maturity. “I learned this in my early years as a head coach: You have to separate the business and football,” he said, calling it “a challenge for both Joey and us because we’re first-year staff.” What the policy actually does is freeze Porter in place until the offseason, with the franchise tag available to keep him through 2027 if Pittsburgh still doesn’t want to pay. In the meantime he sits on PUP with a back injury that flared up during a training-camp mobility test, absorbing risk that can only push his price down, never up.
There’s a term for this in landlord-tenant law: constructive eviction, when an owner never has to formally throw a tenant out because deteriorating conditions do the job instead. Nobody signs an eviction notice; the tenant just eventually leaves, and the landlord gets to call it voluntary. The Steelers’ no-talks policy runs the same play on a delay setting. Porter isn’t cut, traded, or benched. He’s just told to wait, indefinitely, while the thing he’s waiting on quietly erodes his own leverage.
That’s the part the press conference didn’t say out loud, so Ramsey said it for him. The 31-year-old, back from a knee injury on the same day as McCarthy’s comments, spent his first afternoon healthy campaigning for a teammate a decade younger. “We need the whole secondary out there,” Ramsey said. “They got to pay Joey Porter.” He went further: “I’m overly in Joey’s corner. Joey needs to get compensated for being a valuable part of this secondary and being a valuable part of this defense and team.” The reaction online moved just as fast.
https://twitter.com/UnderdogNFL/status/2091938377729708207
Ramsey isn’t wrong about the number. Porter and Devon Witherspoon came out of the same 2023 draft class — Porter to Pittsburgh in the second round, Witherspoon fifth overall to the Seattle Seahawks — and while Porter posted 52 tackles, 14 passes defensed, an interception, and a sack last season on an expiring rookie deal, Witherspoon just signed a four-year, $132 million extension averaging $33 million a year with $101 million guaranteed, the richest cornerback contract in NFL history. Porter’s camp is reportedly seeking Witherspoon-range money; Pittsburgh’s front office, per a Witherspoon contract comparison from Athlon, doesn’t view him in that bracket yet. That gap is exactly what an in-season freeze protects: every week Porter doesn’t practice is a week nobody has to explain why the number won’t move.
It isn’t that Pittsburgh can’t find the money. This is an organization that just handed a non-starter $100 million, run by the same coaching staff that talked Aaron Rodgers into one more year instead of paying its own homegrown corner what the market already told them he’s worth. McCarthy said he’d “love the opportunity to coach Joey Porter,” which is true in the way it’s true that landlords love their tenants right up until the lease gets inconvenient. Pittsburgh opens the season against the Falcons in under three weeks. Porter still hasn’t practiced. The impasse will keep being called an impasse for exactly as long as it keeps working in the Steelers’ favor.
