Once the decision was made to give Sam Howell a shot at quarterback, the Washington Commanders two biggest needs were addressing the offensive line and adding depth to the secondary. Washington added some offensive lineman in free agency and will likely draft an offensive lineman or two as well. At cornerback though, the Commanders are still pretty thin. Kendall Fuller and Benjamin St-Juste played relatively well as the starting corners last year, but the team lacks depth behind them and a true nickel corner option.
With the need for more cornerbacks obvious, the Commanders could look to take advantage of a strong class of cornerbacks in this draft and take one high. The corner I’ve seen mocked to them in mock drafts most often is Penn State’s Joey Porter Jr. Porter measures in at 6-foot-2, 189 pounds with incredibly long arms at 34 inches. That length is offensive tackle type of length rather than cornerback length. For a point of reference, Benjamin St-Juste, who the Commanders drafted in the third-round back in 2021, has 32-inch arms and he’s considered a very long corner with length being one of his best traits. Porter’s arms are two inches longer.
What that means for Porter is that he can reach receivers and get his hands on them while they typically can’t reach him. What you’ll hear from most draft analysts about Porter is that he’s almost purely a press corner that has to line up on the line of scrimmage and press receivers otherwise he will struggle. From watching Porter, that somewhat rings true. He’s at his best when he is able to use that incredible length to get his hands on a receiver and jam them at the line of scrimmage, disrupting their release and timing of the route. The trend I found was that when a receiver takes an outside release against Porter, he’s fantastic at jamming them, forcing them wide to the sideline and eliminating them from the play.
Here are three examples from three different games of Porter playing press coverage against a receiver taking an outside release. On all three plays, we see Porter take away the inside, get his inside hand on the inside shoulder of the receiver and use his length and physicality to drive the receiver as wide as he can. Forcing the receiver to the sideline closes and potential throwing window and while doing that, Porter sticks tight to discourage any type of back shoulder throw.
On all three plays he takes his receiver out of the equation, which is obviously an incredibly attractive quality to have in a corner. However, while Porter was excellent against receivers taking outside releases, I noticed he had some issues with receivers breaking inside.
These two plays against Purdue are both just simple slant routes against Porter. On the first play of the clip, Porter aligns with outside leverage, which is a somewhat odd decision given the situation. He’s in man coverage all the way out at the numbers with the sideline as his closest form of help, which would typically dictate the corner playing with inside leverage. But perhaps that’s what he was asked to do. Regardless, playing with outside leverage leaves space inside for the receiver, who takes a hop step outside to widen Porter further before sharply cutting back inside. Porter struggles to match the quickness and allows the receiver to get away from him, giving up the catch.
The second play is pretty similar, though the alignment is slightly different. This time the receiver aligns a yard or two inside the numbers, which is still pretty far outside. Porter takes that same outside leverage and gets beaten by a similar move to the first play of the clip. The receiver uses a stutter step outside to get Porter to widen before cutting back inside. Porter doesn’t try to jam the receiver and again is late to react as the receiver gets away from him.
Getting beat inside on slants does happen, they are tough routes to defend, but if Porter is going to be a pure press corner, then he will have to learn to take those away. The more worrying concern for me as I continued to watch him was how he consistently struggled with routes that released inside.
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