After long layoff, Giants looking to see what Marvin Austin can bring

If Marvin Austin is on the field for the Giants’ opener against the Cowboys this fall, it will be his first real competitive game in 985 days. It will have been two years, eight months and almost two weeks since he was a junior at North Carolina in the Meineke Car Care Bowl against Pittsburgh. That’s a long time to go between playing football. Consider that Plaxico Burress missed only about a month more than that between his last game with the Giants in 2008 and his first game with the Jets last season.

No wonder Jerry Reese expressed some concern for Austin, last year’s second-round draft pick who missed his rookie year with a torn pectoral muscle.

But Reese may be one of the few siding towards caution with Austin. The player himself says he’s fine, excited, and ready to go despite missing so much time. And there’s at least one coach on the staff who can’t wait to get him on the field.

“I’m excited about Marvin Austin,” defensive coordinator Perry Fewell said yesterday. “Marvin Austin, I know he hasn’t played in a couple of years, he excited me last year in the training camp, in the preseason game. He’s different than the other defensive tackles we have because he has legit speed and quickness and get off. So, I’m going to have to learn how to use Marvin a little bit differently than I use Linval Joseph and Shaun Rogers and Rocky Bernard because I think that he can really cause some offensive linemen some problems with some of the things that he can do.”

Of course it’s difficult to see what an interior defensive lineman can bring to the team when the Giants spent the offseason in shorts and shirts and without hitting. Most of the minicamp and OTAs were about installation and learning, so there wasn’t much time on the field. That will change when the team gets to Albany and Austin gets to start football for real once again. That’s when we’ll all be able to tell if Austin has lost anything during his downtime and if he was able to keep himself in what players call “football shape.”

“In this (minicamp), conditioning wasn’t a problem and so you really won’t find that out until you put on the pads and the structure of how the one-a-days go or the two-a-days go, in training camp,” Fewell said. “It will be up to Marvin to come back in peak condition, so these next five weeks he has off, I assume he will really crank it up and get into better condition. Right after practice (Thursday) he was on the elliptical, he was working. I know that we’ve talked about him being in the best condition that he can possibly be in, in order to get peak performance and we expect that.”