After months of a contract saga that slowly looked worse and worse for the Steelers, cornerback Joey Porter Jr. was traded to the Cowboys less than 24 hours before Pittsburgh’s Week 4 matchup against the Cleveland Browns.
The outcome was’t unsurprising following Porter’s lack of participation with the team throughout the offseason and during the first few weeks of regular season play. He was often listed as having a back injury, but by the end it seemed obvious that it was a cover for a contract holdout of sorts.
The cornerback market skyrocketed in value this offseason, and Porter was undoubtedly looking for a hefty payday following his breakout 2025 campaign — and he still might not get that deal from the Cowboys, who notably did not have an extension agreement in place when they traded for Porter.
Still, the Steelers are now without a promising cornerback in a year where the team clearly should be trying to collect a strong foundation of young players — and Pittsburgh looks thin when it comes to talent in the secondary, as well. Was the 2028 second-round pick and conditional 2027 sixth really a fair price to get in return?
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The Athletic: NFL Execs Think Dallas Overpaid for JPJ
This is an absolutely fascinating article by Jonathan Jones at The Athletic. While he discusses the Porter Jr. trade and why many in the league think Dallas overpaid, he also talks about why discounting future draft picks (e.g., "A 2027 second round pick is more valuable than a 2028 second round pick") is incorrect and driven by GMs' employment insecurity. It even cites research by Richard Thaler, a founder of modern behavioral economics.
Here are some of the relevant paragraphs on JPJ, but it is a longer article, and I'd encourage you to take a minute to read it.
The Joey Porter Jr. trade presented perhaps the largest delta between public perception and league perception of a deal that I have seen in some time.
On Wednesday night, the Pittsburgh Steelers did their usual thing: deal a top draft pick to the Dallas Cowboys. First it was George Pickens, then Broderick Jones and now Porter, who went to the Cowboys for a 2027 sixth-round pick and a 2028 second-rounder. Steelers fans believe general manager Omar Khan didn’t get enough. Most of the NFL disagrees.
[...]
Many around the league believed Dallas overpaid, based largely on the belief that teams don’t view Porter as a top-tier corner. The Cowboys have a strong recent history of overpaying for talent: a fourth for Trey Lance, a fourth for receiver Jonathan Mingo, a fifth for Joe Milton, a fourth for Rashan Gary.
“They were bidding against themselves for Porter,” says one executive with a team that was erroneously tied to trading for the cornerback. (There was at least one other team in the running, though: Lions head coach Dan Campbell conceded Friday that Detroit was “in on” Porter.)
[...]
The 2027 draft is set to be the deepest in years, so in that case a draft pick in a better class is more valuable than a pick in a lesser class. But no one is stopping Khan from using his 2028 second-rounder as ammo in next year’s draft, or even before the Nov. 10 trade deadline to help the 2026 Steelers.
Read more
At face value, this didn’t look like a great trade for the Steelers. And Dallas, even if it doesn’t agree to an extension with Porter, can still acquire a 2028 compensatory pick to recoup some of its losses. Still, Porter might’ve been asking for too much contract-wise after just one year of high-end play. Right now, it doesn’t look likely, but there’s still a chance the Steelers could “win” this trade down the road.
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