One of the most interesting battles heading into the spring was at cornerback where West Virginia had two players vying for the right to claim on job.

While junior Nicktroy Fortune returns to bring stability to one side, West Virginia has a hole to fill at the other after Dreshun Miller exited the program via the transfer portal. Miller started nine games for the Mountaineers last season and vacates 557 snaps across his 9 games started.

The two squaring off for the role were primarily believed to be junior Jackie Matthews and freshman Daryl Porter with things appearing neck-and-neck entering spring ball.

But it was Matthews that had dominated much of the talk for the majority of the spring as he clearly moved ahead in the battle at the position. That was until the annual Gold-Blue game where Porter made the most of his opportunities to showcase what he could do when it mattered most.

Porter intercepted a pass and had two pass breakups while recording a tackle during the game, clearly looking the part at the cornerback position. That’s not to say that Matthews didn’t hold his own either with a pair of tackles and a pass breakup, but the performance from Porter came at the right time.

It’s exactly the type of lasting impression that Porter wanted to send the coaches heading into the summer and eventually the fall as the competition will be set to heat back up again.

A big reason for that is because the West Virginia coaching staff weighs performances inside the stadium in scrimmage situations heavily compared to standard practices. So, playing as well as Porter did to close the spring is significant in the eyes of the decision makers.

“I think they do hold more value,” head coach Neal Brown said.

This level of play certainly isn’t foreign to Porter who drew high praise from the coaches for his efforts in fall camp last fall as a true freshman but managed to only parlay that into 17 snaps across two games once the season kicked off. But that can be explained according to Brown.

“We did split practices and we went and got back together, and he wasn’t performing as well, and he got tired. His body really got tired because he was a true freshman and we didn’t have a normal lead in from a summer workout perspective that you would have in a normal situation,” Brown said.

Matthews exits the spring almost assuredly with a leg up and has the most on-the-field experience playing 74 snaps last year with over half of those coming in the Liberty Bowl. In that game Matthews started in the place of Miller and graded out well especially in the tackling department.

The former junior college all-American wasn’t tested in coverage often though allowing 2 completions on the 4 passes thrown his way for a total of 21 yards.

Still, it was the close that Porter needed especially with even more competition coming in that room after the Mountaineers signed Illinois State transfer cornerback Charles Woods, an FCS all-American. And for Porter it couldn’t have come at a better time.

“He’s a guy we need to come on. He played better at the end of the spring than he did at the beginning,” Brown said. “The pick he had over Sam Brown in the end zone I thought that was a special play, he had two pass breakups that were great plays.”

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