Jason Pierre-Paul vows he is ready to wreak havoc again.
One full year removed from back surgery, no longer a one-armed pass rusher sabotaged by a left shoulder strain, Pierre-Paul said he feels like a giant again.
“I got something to prove this year and shut a whole bunch of people up,” he said Wednesday at Giants mini-camp.
Quarterbacks and doubters beware.
“Oh yeah, a lot of people were doubting me but I’m back now to the point I need to be, and I’m very happy,” Pierre-Paul said. “And everybody in the locker room is happy, too.”
He feels explosive again at a trim 275 pounds.
“I’m flying to the ball,” Pierre-Paul said. “Last year … you couldn’t expect me to come in and do what I did two years or the year before that. It wasn’t going to happen. The doctor told me that. Then I got hurt with my shoulder, whatever. That’s actually when I started feeling better when I got hurt with my shoulder. I’m looking past that now, and I’m ready to start a new year.”
Pierre-Paul was a shell of his Superman self with two sacks in 2013.
“Let me tell you something, back surgery, it’s more to it,” he said. “First of all, your back is not strong. Turning the edge, I lost all that basically. But I got all that back now. That was the main key, if you can’t turn the edge or flip your hips, then you can’t get around the corner as a defensive end, and everybody knows that. But I have all that now.
“It’s not like I didn’t want to go full speed, it was just that I couldn’t.”
He rushed back for his team.
“It takes about a year to actually heal, that’s what the doctor told me,” Pierre-Paul said. “It wasn’t no year, it was a couple of months, about four months.”
A bolstered Big Blue secondary has him even more excited.
“Yeah it does make a difference, because we all work as one,” Pierre-Paul said. “If I can’t get to the quarterback, or we can’t get to the quarterback, then the quarterback has all day to throw the ball. We all work as one and I think they do a pretty good job ‘cause we’ve been getting to the quarterback pretty fast.”
At the end of last season, he predicted he would be unstoppable in 2014. “When I’m at the top of my game,” he said, “it’s ridiculous.”
His expectations? “Sky’s the limit,” Pierre-Paul said. “I’m a greedy guy when it comes to me playing or whatever.”