Joey Porter Jr.
An image of Joey Porter Jr. from IBTimes/Instagram.

The labor dispute developing between Joey Porter Jr. and the Pittsburgh Steelers raises an important new question for the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement, and could create significant conflict between the NFLPA and the NFL in the next round of collective bargaining.

In 2026, Pittsburgh Steelers cornerback Joey Porter Jr. entered training camp without a new contract. On the first day of training camp, he reported aggravating a back injury and left practice. He has yet to play in a game for the Pittsburgh Steelers this year. He was first listed as medically unable to play due to back pain, and the team’s injury report has since added a conditioning designation.

Before getting into the dispute, it is important to say upfront that football is a dangerous and physically demanding game. Pain is common for players, and developing long-running injuries is not uncommon. Porter Jr. may very well be experiencing ongoing back pain due to the nature of his work.

Yet some fans and commentators have questioned the truthfulness of Porter Jr.’s claims about back pain.

That skepticism is grounded in changes to the NFL’s most recent collective bargaining agreement, signed in 2020, which increased penalties for players who, in seeking a new contract, refuse to practice or play. The new penalties – greater fines and docking players’ service time – are especially important for Porter Jr. because they could prevent him from qualifying for unrestricted free agency.

Due to these increased penalties, a player seeking a new contract can no longer simply hold out for a new deal without incurring significant repercussions. In July 2023, J.C. Tretter, then-President of the NFL Players’ Association (NFLPA), made comments that the NFL alleged encouraged players to gain leverage in contract negotiations by exaggerating their injuries. The NFL filed and won a grievance against the NFLPA, and an arbitrator found that such statements violated the NFL’s CBA. That grievance targeted the union, not a player. To my knowledge, there has been no grievance between the NFL and an individual player regarding faux or exaggerated injuries.

If the team were to challenge whether Porter Jr. was faking or exaggerating an injury to gain leverage in his contract negotiation, could it succeed? This issue goes beyond Porter Jr. and his team: if teams cannot effectively challenge an injury claim, other players seeking leverage may follow the same path. There is a significant medical literature on pain – and specifically back pain – that speaks to if medical providers can verify the existence and intensity of pain.

Detecting Back Pain

The key question in the dispute between Porter Jr. and the Steelers would be whether he is medically capable of playing professional football. I am not a medical doctor, and can only speak to my understanding of the existing literature on pain and employment disability. This is not a small area because many employment disputes around disability and Workers’ Compensation concern pain, and back pain in particular.

A major problem, as Pustilnik (2015), a professor of law at the University of Maryland School of Law and faculty at the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital, writes, is that pain is invisible:

Courts struggle with questions relating to the reality and verifiability of chronic pain and appear to struggle in particular with the invisibility of pain. Pain’s invisibility is its famous problem: As the seminal scholar on pain, Elaine Scarry, explained, pain “may seem to have … no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth.”… Adjudicators may reject well-substantiated claims where the claimant does not offer visual medical evidence like X-rays or MRIs, even though such technologies are often irrelevant to pain diagnosis.

Pustilnik is restating a well-known problem in the pain literature: it is largely invisible to modern medicine. More specifically, pain has no biomarker, meaning that there are no biological tests that can confirm its presence or absence, nor can biological tests reveal pain intensity. Compounding this problem is that chronic pain can endure even after the primary injury is healed:

Rather, chronic pain often has “a life of its own”: it often does not depend on continued peripheral input. It may endure long after any injury has healed, may be entirely out of proportion to the original (sometimes trivial) injury, or may arise in the absence of any injury. (Pustilnik 2015)

The absence of reliable biomarkers for chronic pain creates challenges in administering Workers’ Compensation and Social Security Disability benefits:

Validation of these chronic symptoms is often contentious because no objective biomarker or physical sign can reliably confirm their presence or severity. The concept of illness without measurable parameters challenges clinicians and conflicts with legal systems that rely heavily on objective evidence in adjudicating health-related questions. (Assis et al. 2026)

Absent direct biomarkers to rely on, the medical community and legal field have developed general practices to behaviorally evaluate the existence and severity of pain. All of them look for consistency rather than measuring pain directly:

  1. Functional Capacity Evaluation (FCE). For this test, the patient performs standardized tasks (lifting, bending, etc.), and the evaluator looks for inconsistent performance across tasks and repeated movements.
  2. Observation. The medical provider watches the patient throughout the visit, including walking to the exam room, getting on and off the exam table, and dressing and undressing.
  3. History-taking. The provider asks about treatment, medical history, and how symptoms have changed over time. Questions may be repeated or asked out of order, which makes it more difficult for someone exaggerating or feigning an injury to answer consistently.
  4. Distraction tests. The provider checks whether symptoms stay consistent when the patient’s attention is directed elsewhere, such as when performing an unrelated movement or answering an unrelated request. These tests are not highly reliable.
  5. Symptom validity tests. These questionnaires and scales compare a patient’s response pattern against patterns typical of genuine versus feigned or exaggerated symptoms.
  6. Outside observation. Separate from the medical exam itself, an employer can obtain access to a person’s social media posts or hire investigators to observe the claimant away from the workplace and medical exam.

Yet these methods face challenges. A 2026 review of FCEs by Schwab et al. reports that evaluators find it difficult to distinguish submaximal effort from genuine, person-specific functional limitations. They also note that the field lacks a gold standard and consistent agreement between raters, making FCE reports vulnerable to cross-examination. Further, evaluators’ own judgments about effort are only moderately reliable. Trippolini et al. had clinicians rate physical effort during FCEs and found only modest agreement across clinicians. For an arbitrator, this means that conflicting reports about a patient’s health are not only possible but probable.

Arbitration and Porter Jr.

Should the team file a grievance against Porter Jr. regarding the validity and seriousness of his injury, the team would likely request a neutral medical evaluation of his injury. Given the lack of medically determinative evidence, I expect the neutral medical provider – the same role used in the injury grievance process under Article 44 – to be unlikely to give a recommendation to the arbitrator. Instead, their report is likely to list the tests administered and whether the player’s results were consistent with genuine pain (i.e., whether the tests turned up signs of feigning or exaggeration). This will leave a fair amount of uncertainty for both parties.

There is also an uncomfortable friction between these medical tests and their context: the tests used in evaluating back pain were developed with the general public in mind, and it is unclear how that would affect an arbitrator’s judgment. Professional athletes are far fitter than the general public, so a score that looks normal for an ordinary patient could still signal a real impairment for a player. At the same time, playing through pain is a routine part of the job in the NFL, so struggling with some of these tests may say little about whether a player can actually play. Which consideration should carry more weight?

Underlying all of this is the same problem the medical literature returns to: pain’s invisibility means neither side is likely to have anything close to a decisive piece of evidence to point to. That is not just a problem for the NFL, but one that many cases about Workers’ Compensation, Social Security Disability, and the Americans with Disabilities Act encounter every day. This invisibility is why I believe both parties would like to avoid a grievance, although it may become unavoidable in the coming weeks. And while this issue only concerns one team and its young cornerback, its outcome could have important implications for both the future of free agency in the NFL and its next collective bargaining agreement.