Joey Porter Jr. Announces He’ll Enter 2023 NFL Draft & Skip Bowl Game

In a move that was largely expected, cornerback Joey Porter Jr. announced Wednesday evening that he would be entering the 2023 NFL Draft and sitting out Penn State’s bowl game in the process.

Despite the NFL pedigree and the 6-foot-2 lanky frame, Porter Jr. wasn’t all that highly regarded as a prospect. Yes, he was a four-star recruit with a 89.69 rating, but that was only good enough to be ranked as the 15th best prospect Penn State’s 23-player 2019 recruiting class. So it’s safe to say that Porter Jr. outplayed his ranking by a whole lot.

A three-year starter at Penn State, Porter Jr. earned All-Big Ten honors during all three of his seasons starting — third team in 2020 and 2021, and first team in 2022. While he doesn’t have the eye-popping interception stats that a lot of high profile cornerbacks do (Porter’s lone career interception came against Indiana in 2021), he was everything you could want from a lockdown cornerback, as evidenced by his performance against Purdue earlier this season when he finished with a school-record six passes defended.

From here, Porter Jr. sits in a pretty good position to be a first round pick come the NFL Draft in late spring. Most mock drafts around the interweb have him going in the middle portion of the first round, so unless he suffers an injury in the lead up, it’s hard to see him dropping beyond Day 1.