Joey Porter Jr. Threw Up Outside His Uber on Game Day. What a Stomach Bug Does to an Athlete.
Joey Porter Jr. was traded to Dallas on October 1, played a handful of snaps at Houston, and was sent home before his first home game on October 8 after throwing up outside his Uber on the way to the stadium. On Wednesday he told reporters the whole day, from an itchy throat to “brutal.” Sunday night the Cowboys play the Packers at Lambeau Field, and he expects no limits. We read what a sudden vomiting illness does to an athlete’s body, why teams send a sick player home, and the race study that put a number on playing through it.
Joey Porter Jr., the cornerback the Dallas Cowboys acquired from the Pittsburgh Steelers on October 1, 2026, missed the Cowboys' Thursday night game against Tampa Bay on October 8 after falling ill on game day. He said on October 14 that his throat was itchy at the morning walkthrough, that it "kept getting worse and worse," and that on the way to the stadium he was "throwing up outside of my Uber." The team sent him home. He has not named the illness, and the Cowboys listed it only as an illness. He practised fully on October 15, listed with an ankle injury, and said he expects no limits on Sunday, October 18, when Dallas plays Green Bay at Lambeau Field at 8:20 p.m. Eastern on NBC. Vomiting is coordinated by a network in the brainstem that relaxes and reverses the stomach, which is why a nap does not fix it. In a 2017 study of 172 ill runners against 53,734 healthy ones, a systemic illness in the 24 hours before a race made a runner seven times as likely not to finish, and the American College of Sports Medicine puts the performance cost of lost water at 2 percent of body weight. Teams send vomiting players home because the most common cause of sudden vomiting, norovirus, spreads by contact and surfaces and can be passed on for two weeks after recovery, according to the CDC. Educational, not medical advice.
The ride to AT&T Stadium on the evening of October 8 should have been the shortest part of Joey Porter Jr.’s week. He had been a Dallas Cowboy for seven days. He had missed the team bus after trying to sleep off whatever had started in his throat that morning, called a car, and was on his way to his first home game when the day gave out. “On my way to the game, that’s when I realized when I was throwing up outside of my Uber on the way to the game,” he told reporters on Wednesday, in remarks reported by ESPN’s Todd Archer. “So it was brutal, not going to lie.” The Cowboys made him inactive before kickoff, sent him home, and lost to Tampa Bay 24-16. On Sunday night they play the Packers at Lambeau Field, and Porter says he expects to play without limits.
He has not said what the illness was, and the team’s report never listed a cause, so this is not a story about a diagnosis. It is a story about what a sudden vomiting illness does to any body that is supposed to perform in a few hours, why a nap cannot fix it, why a team sends a player home rather than letting him try, and the number from 53,000 runners that says how often playing through it works.
The moment: on October 8, 2026, on the way to the Cowboys’ Thursday night game against Tampa Bay, Porter was “throwing up outside of my Uber,” by his own account; the team sent him home and Dallas lost 24-16.
The week: traded from Pittsburgh on October 1, a handful of snaps at Houston on October 4, inactive on October 8, full practice on October 15, and “shooting for” no limits at Green Bay on Sunday night, October 18.
The reflex: vomiting is run by a network in the brainstem that relaxes the top of the stomach and reverses it; there is no single switch to turn off, which is why a nap did not fix it (2001 review).
The number: in a study of 172 ill runners against 53,734 healthy ones, a systemic illness in the 24 hours before the race made a runner seven times as likely not to finish.
The cost: the American College of Sports Medicine puts the point where lost water starts to cost performance at 2 percent of body weight, about 4 pounds for a 200-pound player.
The locker room: the most common cause of sudden vomiting in the US spreads by touch, food and surfaces and can be passed on for two weeks after recovery, per the CDC; in December 2010 it moved through 13 NBA teams.
Sources: Porter to ESPN and DallasCowboys.com, October 14, 2026; Packers.com injury report, October 15; Hornby, 2001; Gordon et al., 2017; Sawka et al., 2007; CDC; Desai et al., 2011. Porter has not named his illness and this article does not. Educational, not medical advice.
The week: Traded on a Wednesday, sick on a Thursday, full go by the next one
Porter, 26, a second-round pick out of Penn State in 2023, had been inactive for the Steelers’ first three games during a contract stalemate and a back problem when Dallas traded for him on October 1, sending Pittsburgh a sixth-round pick in 2027 and a second-rounder in 2028, the Associated Press reported. He played a handful of snaps in his debut at Houston on October 4 and, the Cowboys would later list, hurt an ankle in that game. Then came the short week. “My throat was itchy in the morning when we had our little walkthrough and I was trying to get on top of it,” he said Wednesday. “I told them about it. They gave me the right stuff for it and then throughout the day it just kept getting worse and worse.” On the team’s own site, Patrik Walker had the rest: “I really just couldn’t hold anything down. You know, I just kept throwing up. I tried to take a nap before the game, just to shake it off,” and, after the Uber: “So that’s when they made the call to send me home.”
A Thursday game buys a player ten days before the next one, and Porter used them. The official injury report for Sunday’s game lists him with an ankle, limited on Wednesday and a full participant on Thursday; no Cowboy is listed with an illness. “That’s what I’m shooting for,” he said of a full workload at Lambeau, per Archer. “That’s what they’re shooting for as well.” NBC Sports reported Thursday night that he expects no limitations. The game is Sunday, October 18, at 8:20 p.m. Eastern on NBC and Peacock, Dallas at 2-3 against a 3-2 Green Bay team that has won seven of the last nine regular-season meetings; last year’s game ended 40-40.
The reflex: Why “I couldn’t hold anything down” cannot be napped off
Vomiting is not a stomach deciding to empty. It is a sequence run from the brainstem, and the plainest map of it is a 2001 review in the American Journal of Medicine by Pamela Hornby. Two kinds of input reach the medulla: chemical sensors in a small structure called the area postrema, which samples the blood for toxins and drugs, and the vagus nerve, which reports on what the gut contains and how tense it is. Those signals converge on a cluster of neurons that Hornby describes as a central pattern generator, a circuit that plays the whole act in order. “There is not an isolated ‘vomiting center,’” she writes, but loosely organised groups of neurons through the medulla activated in sequence. The first move in that sequence is the one Porter described without knowing its name: the upper stomach relaxes, which Hornby calls “a prodromal event essential for emesis.” A stomach that has been told to relax and reverse does not hold a pre-game meal, a sports drink or a nap.
That is the difference between this and the vomiting we wrote about at Kona last week, where an eight-hour effort in the heat pulls blood away from the gut and a slowed stomach rebels against the fuel going into it. Taylor Knibb could keep running through hers because the trigger was the race. Porter’s trigger was something in him before the race started, and the circuit does not care whether kickoff is in three hours.
The number: What playing through a stomach bug costs, from 53,000 runners
Football has no study of its own on this, so the best numbers come from a sport that counts every entrant: distance running. In a 2016 paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Martin Schwellnus’s group at the University of Pretoria surveyed 7,031 runners in the days before a race. One in five reported symptoms of an acute illness in the previous eight to twelve days and one in thirteen reported systemic symptoms, the kind below the neck, such as fever, vomiting or muscle aches. Those who started anyway were 1.9 times as likely not to finish. The follow-up, published in 2017, examined 172 runners with a diagnosed pre-race illness against 53,734 healthy controls. Runners with a systemic illness failed to finish 8 percent of the time against 1.6 percent; those diagnosed within 24 hours of the start failed to finish 11.1 percent of the time, seven times the rate of healthy runners. And of the runners whose doctors advised them not to run, 56.5 percent did not start, against 19.2 percent of the controls. Porter’s illness was diagnosed, by him, in an Uber inside that 24-hour window.
Runners with a systemic illness in the 24 hours before a race were seven times as likely not to finish it. The Cowboys did not make Porter try.
The sports-medicine shorthand for the call the Cowboys made is older than the data. A 2003 review in Current Sports Medicine Reports says the question of who plays and who sits with an infection “can be guided by the ‘neck check’ rules”: symptoms above the neck, a runny nose or a scratchy throat, leave the decision open; symptoms below it, and vomiting is the definition of below, close it. Porter’s morning was above the neck. By the drive to the stadium it was not. Underneath the shorthand is water. The American College of Sports Medicine’s position stand on fluid replacement puts the point at which lost water starts to cost performance at a 2 percent drop in body weight; for a 200-pound cornerback that is about 4 pounds, our arithmetic, and a body that cannot keep fluid down is losing it from both ends of the equation. The statement’s whole premise is drinking during exercise to stay under that line. Porter could not drink.
The locker room: Why teams send a vomiting player home instead of letting him try
The second reason to send a player home is everyone else. Porter has not named his illness and we are not naming one for him. But the most common cause of sudden vomiting in the country is well described, and it explains the policy. The CDC calls norovirus “the leading cause of vomiting and diarrhea, and foodborne illness in the United States.” A person usually develops symptoms 12 to 48 hours after exposure, most get better within one to three days, and, the agency says, “you can still spread norovirus for 2 weeks or more after you feel better,” through direct contact, shared food and utensils, and surfaces that fingers then carry to mouths. A football facility is contact, shared food and surfaces.
Professional sport has watched that happen. In December 2010, the CDC documented in Clinical Infectious Diseases, 24 players and staff from 13 NBA teams came down with gastroenteritis; four of five stool samples tested positive for norovirus, and investigators found transmission within teams and, in two instances, potentially between teams that had played each other. A player who throws up at the walkthrough and then dresses for the game is a vector with a locker. The Cowboys’ call on October 8 protected a roster, and the ten days of the mini-bye happen to cover most of the window in which the common bug clears. Whether a stomach bug is going around your own city this week is the question our norovirus tracker answers from wastewater and outbreak data.
The rest of us: A 5K, a rec-league game, a stomach bug: the same seven-times number
Nobody reading this will be a full go at Lambeau on Sunday, but the physiology is not pro-sized. The runners in the Pretoria studies were mostly amateurs, the kind who sign up for a 10K and get a bug the night before, and the seven-times number is theirs. The neck check is a rule for them too, and it is a description of what tends to happen, not an instruction: a stomach that is reversing itself will not hold the water a hard effort needs, and the CDC’s one-to-three-day course is the same length for a cornerback and a run club. Porter’s version had one advantage most people do not get, a team that made the decision for him and a schedule that gave him ten days. “It was brutal,” he said. Then he practised.
Facts to carry: Joey Porter Jr. was traded from the Steelers to the Cowboys on October 1, 2026, played a handful of snaps at Houston on October 4, and missed the October 8 Thursday night loss to Tampa Bay after, by his own account on October 14, an itchy throat at the morning walkthrough became vomiting on the way to the stadium; the Cowboys sent him home and listed only an illness; he practised fully on October 15, with an ankle listed, and expects no limits at Green Bay on Sunday night, October 18, at 8:20 p.m. Eastern on NBC. Vomiting is run by a brainstem circuit whose first act is relaxing the upper stomach, so it cannot be napped off; in a 2017 study of 172 ill runners against 53,734 controls, a systemic illness in the 24 hours before a race made a runner seven times as likely not to finish; the American College of Sports Medicine puts the performance cost of lost water at 2 percent of body weight; and the CDC says the most common cause of sudden vomiting can be passed on for two weeks after recovery, which is why teams send sick players home. Nothing here describes Porter’s health beyond his own public words and the Cowboys’ official report. The Dallas Cowboys, the Green Bay Packers, the NFL, ESPN, NBC, the outlets cited and Porter himself had no involvement in this article. It is educational, describes what the cited studies and sources say, and is not medical advice.