On Wednesday, Steelers coach Mike McCarthy wasn’t asked about cornerback Joey Porter Jr. On Thursday, McCarthy was.
He didn’t seem to like it very much.
After McCarthy said Porter, who was officially limited in practice on Wednesday, is scheduled “to do some more today, so we’ll see how that goes,” McCarthy was asked whose decision it was for Porter to be limited on Wednesday.
“We have a plan for every one of our players,” McCarthy said, via Brandon Contes of Awful Announcing. “So, he did the work that was planned on.”
McCarthy then was asked whether that means it was the team’s plan for Porter to be limited.
“We’re not gonna play this game anymore about every little question,” McCarthy said. “You can just see [P.R. director] Burt [Lauten] for the injury report.”
And here’s where a strange situation becomes even more strange. On Wednesday, the team’s website listed Porter as limited with this designation: “not injury related — conditioning.” The NFL’s official report, which is distributed via email, said on both Wednesday and Thursday that Porter was limited due to “not injury related — other.”
The team’s website, as of this posting, contains no specific injury description for any of the injured Steelers players: Porter, Jamel Dean, Rico Dowdle, Gennings Dunker, Cole Holcomb, Michael Pittman Jr., Jalen Ramsey, or Jaylen Warren.
While it’s possible that the error is clerical (frankly, we can’t recall ever seeing a team website omitting the specific source of the injury for its players), the deeper issue here is whether the Steelers’ representations to the world regarding Porter’s status will become relevant if/when the Steelers decide to play hardball with Porter.
If they’ve been officially saying Porter is injured (for Week 1, it was “back” and for Week 2, it was “back” and “conditioning”), it becomes awkward for the Steelers to suddenly contend that he was fine all along, if they ever choose to do that.
Either way, the tension seems to be increasing. As evidenced by McCarthy’s reaction to fair and reasonable questions about Porter that were posed to the head coach on Thursday.