"I think Joey's a great guy, a great player. I think it's really time for him to shine," Slay said. "I'm going to help him and make sure he's the best player he can be, give him all the tools that I've learned from the older guys that I have played with in the league. It's his time. I think I'm here to help him blossom. He's already a great player as it is. I'm here to keep him climbing to his ceiling."
Some viewed Porter's second season in the NFL as not as good as his first, largely because he had a few games in which he drew multiple penalties. That led to him having 12 accepted penalties against him last season, the most of any defensive back in the league.
But everything is relative. The more man coverage you play, the more likely you are to be penalized. New York's duo of D.J. Reed and Sauce Gardner, for example, were both penalized nine times each in 2024. Gardner missed two games, while Reed, who was signed to a three-year, $48-million free agent contract in the offseason by Detroit, missed three games.
They were considered one of the top cornerback duos in the league the last couple of seasons.
Porter has the size and skillset to be one of the league's top cornerbacks. What he has lacked in his first two seasons has been a player on the opposite side of him – Patrick Peterson in 2023 and Donte Jackson in 2024 – hasn't necessarily been capable of playing man coverage to his level. They were good corners, but Slay has shown he's still a capable man coverage corner.
The Eagles played man-to-man 25 percent of the time in 2024. The Steelers were at 36.7 percent in 2024, the seventh-highest rate in the league.
Nobody plays man all the time, but Slay is still dynamic enough to allow the Steelers to mix their coverages well. And as he mentioned, he can continue to teach the 24-year-old Porter the nuances of being a No. 1 cornerback in the NFL, something Slay has been over the course of his career.
• According to multiple reports, the vote at the Spring League Meeting to ban assisting the quarterback by shoving him from behind, the so-called "tush push," was extremely close to passing.
In the end, it fell two votes short of the 24 it needed to pass.
And here's the thing, team's weren't necessarily voting against the play because they couldn't stop it or they wanted to punish the Eagles for being so good at it.