Football
While Cam Heyward contemplates playing in 2026, it sounds like he may have gone under the knife to clean up his knee. At least that’s what Joey Porter Sr. implied on Heyward’s Not Just Football podcast. At 36 years old, he’s taken his share of lumps, so cleanup procedures shouldn’t be surprising. But with the amount of change in Pittsburgh right now, it’s worth considering all the variables regarding his future.
Heyward had Porter and NFL insider Dianna Russini as guests on his podcast. Russini was gently prodding Heyward about whether he would retire, given Mike Tomlin’s resignation. As is his nature, Porter interjected.
“We will see”, Heyward said about his future. Then Porter responded, “Man, he didn’t get that knee all fixed up for nothing”. While he left it in the cut of the podcast, Heyward seemed surprised by the reveal. “Damn, you’re just gonna air that out, too?” he said with a smile. Looking back at his co-host, Hayden Walsh threw his hands up and said, “I didn’t say it, don’t look at me!”
Russini then joked about having breaking news that Cam Heyward was not retiring. The panel then joked about Porter being an insider, to which he responded, “Well, I knew because you had surgery”. Even more flustered, Heyward said, “Yeah, just keep going! ‘I knew you had surgery’” as if to say, “Peezy, stop spilling the beans”.
Cam Heyward played every game last season for the Steelers, totaling 823 snaps in the regular season. That was a higher workload—though the same percentage—as last season when he played 778 snaps in 17 games.
While he had no major injuries during the year, he did have one scare. At the start of the Steelers’ Week 18 game against the Ravens, he took a friendly-fire hit to the knee. Chasing down RB Derrick Henry, he found teammate CB James Pierre jostled into a collision course with his lower body after WR Zay Flowers blocked him into Heyward.
Pierre made direct contact with his knee, and Heyward left the game, which drew concern from his teammates. But he soon returned and played a strong game—including 37 total snaps, or 72.5 percent. He finished the contest with 7 tackles and a quarterback hit—and three snaps on offense as the Tush Pusher.
Obviously, that lone knee injury wasn’t severe enough to do significant damage. If the Steelers had concerns about it, at the very least, they might have abandoned their plan to throw him on offense following TE Darnell Washington’s injury. But it could have contributed to accumulating issues that prompted Heyward’s theoretical knee operation.
Heyward did have an MRI at the end of the season. He mentioned that he was the last one into the meeting room when Tomlin announced his resignation because he was “handling an MRI, he told Rich Eisen. “Did I just hear this right? Mike T’s about to step down?”, he said.
At least based on Heyward’s reaction to Porter’s comment, it seems likely he did have some type of cleanup procedure. As far as Porter’s remarks implying that he might not have done it, or needed to do it, if he didn’t intend to keep playing, that’s neither here nor there. He can still have had it done as a necessary condition to play while still weighing his options.
Still, while he won’t come out and say it, it appears very much that Cam Heyward intends to return for a 16th season. It will be his first—everybody in Pittsburgh’s first—without Mike Tomlin, though. But they seem to have respect for Mike McCarthy, a Pittsburgh native with a winning record. And quite possibly the man responsible for Heyward being in Pittsburgh. It was because McCarthy’s Packers beat the Steelers in Super Bowl XLIII that they had the 31st pick in the draft, rather than the 32nd.
Read More Matthew Marczi