6 Pittsburgh Steelers who made the NFL rewrite its rules

Joey Porter-1999-2006 as player 2014-2019 coach

He Established a career as a tough as nails linebacker you tried to avoid. Fan’s loved his hard-nosed style of play, reminding Steeler fans of the days of Lambert and Ham. Ironically, however, the rule change he is associated with came after his playing days ended.

Pittsburgh faced Cincinnati yet again in the 2015 playoffs. Late in the game, Vonteze Burfict hit Antonio Brown directly in the head. Thus, costing the Bengals a crucial 15-yard penalty. Following the hit outside linebacker coach Joey Porter came out onto the field to check the status of the injury to Antonio.  Then things turned to chaos as a scuffle broke out between the Bengals defense and Coach Porter.

The incident, seemingly instigated by Marcus Gilberry with a chest bump followed by Vontaze Burfict, grabbing Porter’s jacket,  culminating in a punch thrown at Porter by Adam “Pacman” Jones. The refs threw the flag again, Costing Cincinnati 15 more crucial yards. Thinking they could intimidate Porter backfired as he stared them down with a look in his eye, sending the message if they wanted to throw down this would get real ugly fast. The Bengals claimed Porter had been trash-talking, although replays indicate no such thing.

The craziness resulted in not only a last-second Cincinnati loss by a field goal, and eventually deleted twitter post by Adam Jones, and another NFL rule change. The new rule established that only the head coach to go onto the field with an injured player prohibiting all assistant coaches from doing so. The NFL passed the rule in 2016 and dubbed it the Joey Porter Rule.