Kenny Phillips ahead of schedule in rehab from knee surgery, looking to be 'let loose' next season

MIAMI — The blinds on the windows of the Denny’s on University Avenue in Carol City blocked all of the sunlight but only half of Sun Life Stadium.

Kenny Phillips looked in that direction and shook his head.

“We had a shot,” the Giants safety and former Miami Hurricane said the other day, as the home of the Dolphins was preparing to host the NFL’s biggest game. “With the Super Bowl being in Miami, that was going to be big. The Pro Bowl in Miami, I was looking forward to that also.

“I thought it was going to be a great year for me and the team. But stuff happens.”

For two weeks, it had been a great season for Phillips. For two weeks, he was a dominant presence at the back of the Giants’ secondary that the team had finally decided to unleash.

But for those two weeks, a hole in the cartilage in Phillips’ left knee that had formed sometime in the spring or summer continued to grow. He wasn’t in pain, but his knee would swell. He’d try to “break down” to stop his momentum and change direction but would keep moving forward. He wanted to keep playing but knew with every millimeter of expansion, the hole would be more difficult to repair.

So after two weeks, his season was over. So was the Giants’ given the play they got out of his replacements, C.C. Brown and, later, Aaron Rouse.

“I kind of knew I wasn’t going to finish the year,” Phillips said. “I figured we’d ride until the wheels fell off. I didn’t think they were going to fall off in Week 2.”

Super Bowl XLIV is over, with Saints defensive back Tracy Porter making the kind of play Phillips imagined making. The eyes of the league can now shift toward next season.

For Phillips, next season began in September, when he underwent microfracture surgery in the hope of relieving a condition known as patellofemoral arthritis — an erosion of the cartilage between the kneecap and the femur. It’s a seemingly degenerative condition that immediately sparked concerns it would be “career-threatening.”

But Phillips, who hadn’t discussed his rehab in depth until this past weekend, said those characterizations are off-base.

“It’s fixable, very fixable. A lot of guys have had it,” Phillips said, though he was told it’s rare for a younger player to suffer from it. “It should be a full recovery.”

A Giants spokesman said Phillips “is doing well. The knee is not swelling and progress has been very good.” Team physician Russ Warren and specialist James Andrews, who performed the surgery, “both feel good about where he is right now,” the spokesman said.

Phillips agrees and said he’s ahead of schedule in his rehab. He knew he wouldn’t be able to run for about five months after the surgery and was recently given the green light to start jogging in the pool. But with training camp five months away, doctors have told him not to rush. He won’t run until March 29, exactly six months after the operation.

In the meantime, Phillips rides a stationary bike, does leg presses and walks forward and backward on the treadmill.

“It’s basically a waiting process,” Phillips said. “There’s not much I can do.”

But he wants to let the Giants know he’s doing something, so Phillips has been splitting his time between Miami and New Jersey.

“They trust me to be down here rehabbing on my own, so I just go up there and let them get updates so they don’t think I’m down here fooling around or anything,” he said. “Whenever I want to come home, they let me.”

Phillips also wants to maintain his freedom on the field.

In his rookie season, he didn’t get it. If the coaches wanted him to cover the left half of the field, he had to stay in the left half of the field. If they wanted him 2 yards outside the numbers, he had to be 6 feet, zero inches outside the numbers. If they wanted him 13 yards off the ball at the snap, he had better not have entertained thoughts of playing 7 yards deeper, where he often likes to line up.

All the while, Phillips would smile while he told safeties coach David Merritt, “Just let me loose.”

This past season, Merritt did.

“He came in a meeting one day and was like, ‘Go ahead, the shackles are off. Just play,’ ” Phillips recalled. “The plays I knew I could have made (in 2008), I was making.”

Two came against the Cowboys — his only interceptions of the season. On the first one, which came after the ball bounced off Jason Witten’s foot on a short crossing route, Phillips said he delayed in coming down from his safety position because he knew he could get to Witten. On his second interception — a deep ball overthrown by Tony Romo — Phillips was sitting back comfortably because he had lined up 20 yards off the ball, not 13.

“The more they see I can do that, the more we can start twisting the defense, the more we can call man coverages,” Phillips said, “because we have someone that can cover ground.”

And that’s a key reason for Phillips’ frustration with his injury. Not only did it cost him time on the field, it might have also negated all the goodwill he built up with the coaches. Plus, he’ll have to start from scratch with new defensive coordinator Perry Fewell.

“Coming back from my injury, I’m going to have to prove it all over again, that I can cover enough ground for them to take the shackles off,” Phillips said. “I have to show them I’m still all that. I’m willing to do it, though.”

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(nj.com)