Around noon on Monday, reports surfaced via Rick Maese's Twitter that DeAngelo Hall would be the primary punt returner for the Redskins, replacing Antwaan Randle El. By a little more than an hour later, Ryan O'Halloran was tweeting a conflicting report -- one that squared with what I had been told here at Redskins Park -- that both Hall and Randle El would be involved in the return game, along with Santana Moss.

Randle El talked about this during open locker room today, and he wasn't particularly happy about the change, and he was doubly unhappy that he had learned about it via questions from reporters.

"I gotta find out the logistics of it myself in terms of the punt return," Randle El said. "My whole thing is I'm still gonna ... you know, given the opportunity, when I get the chance, I gotta go out and be little more productive, but, you know, it's not always just one guy there. So it's just a matter of ... you take it as it is: go out and play when you get your opportunity and be thankful for it and make the best of it."

A reporter mentioned that he didn't look thrilled about this change. "Not at all," Randle El responded. "But that's part of it sometimes."

In case that wasn't clear enough, another reporter asked if this was a tough pill for Randle El to swallow. "Little bit," he said.

Later in the day, speaking after practice -- and, apparently, after a meeting with Randle El -- head coach Jim Zorn clarified the situation. Mostly.

With Vinny Cerrato confirming that Jim Zorn will remain as head coach for the rest of the year and "hopefully into the future" (which conjures up images of Zorn standing on the sidelines in a jetpack and a shiny silver jumpsuit coaching the robots from the old Cyberball arcade game), I was interested to hear what the players had to say.

As a rule, players aren't used to being asked for comment on things at 9:00 in the morning as they wait to go to meetings, but the general sense of the guys I talked to was relief, and hope that maybe this would drastically reduce the soap opera quotient of the workweek.

"It's good news, and it's comforting," Antwaan Randle El said. "I mean, that's one thing you always look at in terms of a team: you want to BUILD a team, and it's hard to do it in a year and a half span. If he was to be let go now or in the next couple of games or something, it would just be almost all for nothing. So it's just good to hear that he's here and we can kinda rest our hat on that a little bit."

Antwaan Randle El was one of the offensive bright spots for the Redskins on Sunday. Playing largely from his more natural slot position, Randle El caught 7 passes for 98 yards. Talking to the media on Monday, he found himself about where you'd expect: pleased that he did well; disappointed that the team didn't win.

"We left some stuff out there," he said. "When Jason [Campbell] got the ball knocked out, we had open guys. The deep guy was covered but the underneath guy was open. In the redzone, they all-out-blitzed us and we didn't get it off quick enough."

Which was interesting and all, but -- now that Randle El had converted his strong training camp into a solid start to the regular season -- I was curious enough to ask him about his biggest miss of the preseason, the long pass from Campbell in Jacksonville that went straight through his hands.

This afternoon's practice is the first one of 2009 training camp that's felt routine. The guys came out, did their position drills, did their full group work, and wrapped up. It seemed like an efficient, clockwork practice. (Not that it was quick or easy. At an hour and 45 minutes in muggy, post-rain heat, guys were clearly getting tired even just in shells.)

Out of practice this afternoon: Lorenzo Alexander, Alfred Fincher, Santana Moss, Rueben Riley, Carlos Rogers, J.D. Skolnitsky, Devin Thomas, and Eddie Williams. Again, I get the feeling that most of these guys are being handled cautiously, and would be available if they were fully needed.

Cornelius Griffin, Albert Haynesworth, and Malcolm Kelly did their now-traditional light second-practice work, and even Randy Thomas and Mike Williams were able to get a little light work in.


My vote for best practice performance of the day -- and his best performance thus far in training camp: Antwaan Randle El. He's been something of ... not a forgotten man, as such, but an afterthought at the wide receiver position. We've been spending a lot of time monitoring how Kelly and Thomas are doing and wondering who's going to emerge at the fifth receiver position, all while pretty much ignoring Randle El's camp.

This afternoon he made a few nice catches -- getting ahead of DeAngelo Hall and a safety to pull in a perfect pass on one -- and just generally looked like a guy determined to show that he could still compete. Also, a guy electing to pull his shorts up very, very high. "You're as goofy as those shorts," Devin Thomas told him, as Randle El whooped it up after a catch.

Biggest letdown of the day? The quarterbacks and their trashcan competition.

This morning, Congressional Country Club in Bethesda played host to the Earl Woods Memorial Pro Am, the opening event in the AT&T National hosted by Tiger Woods. As you may have heard, Woods himself elected to have an NFL player in his foursome, but since it wasn't one of the Redskins I didn't see too much of that.

Instead, I walked the back nine with Jason Campbell, Antwaan Randle El, Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau, and PGA Tour pro Mike Weir while they hit balls. (And, in the case of Campbell and Randle El, hit and hit and hit and hit....)

Here's how Campbell described his performance to me after the fact: "I had a couple good shots, but a little too much inconsistency. I'm nowhere near the professional level at golf, but I had fun."

Anyone who has followed athletes and their post-game quotes at all can translate this one, with its telltale keywords "inconsistency" and "had fun".

Antwaan Randle El likes being on TV. Last season, he hosted Redskins Gameday on Fox-5, and he's attending the NFL's Broadcasting Boot Camp at the end of this month. So when NFL Network was looking for a guy to interview a few of his teammates, El was a logical choice.

And if we learn nothing else from his off-the-practice-field interview of DeAngelo Hall, we learn this: DeAngelo Hall is hungry. He even says "hungry" with some serious enthusiasm, drawing it out into a near-drawl to emphasize just how much he wants to succeed this year.

Here, for those of you who hate moving pictures and audio, is a transcription of the relevant portion of the interview.

Well, I jinxed it just a little bit. On this dreary, overcast day -- the last of this four-day batch of OTAs -- Malcolm Kelly was noticeably limited in practice. Coach Zorn, however, does not feel jinxed, and he remains optimistic: "He's been limited in these last couple days because of getting him right back into it," he said after practice. "We want to be smart with what he is doing as well, but he will be practicing next week just the same as he did this week."

I certainly hope so.

Zorn was also optimistic about where the team is, following this week of OTAs. "I think we are better than last year, or coming into last year," he said. "There were a lot more question marks. I'll give you an example, [Chad] Rinehart wasn't ready to accept the full responsibility of what he is already accepting this time. We did move Jon Jansen on, so we do have a clearer picture of the competition at right tackle. We've got legitimate guys working at left tackle to back up Chris Samuels. We've got [Derrick] Dockery in there and he has kept pace with what we were doing last year with Pete Kendall. We are in better shape, no question." So that was good to hear.

On the field today, though, the most interesting things to watch were two drills.


The first was the QB net drill. This is one of those things that never seems to get old for me. I suspect that's because it's so straightforward: QB drops back to pass, Coach Zorn shouts out which hole in the net the ball should go through, and either the throw is a success or a failure. Not much gray area there.

And the star of today's QB net drill?

Once their photos and physicals were done, Antwaan Randle El and Renaldo Wynn headed out of Redskins Park to a Boys & Girls Club in Southeast D.C., where they're going to unveil a Redskins Youth Fitness Zone and lead a group of preteens and teenagers in exercises to combat youth obesity.

I talked to Randle El about it briefly before they departed.

Yesterday, commenter Ax asked me what, precisely, the wide receivers actually do at practice. My initial inclination was to say that they run around a lot and occasionally catch passes, but it seemed like a needlessly glib, unhelpful response.

So I promised that I'd have one of the receivers take me through it today, and explain exactly what they do and what to look for when they're practicing. I had assumed that this would have to wait until open locker room, or later today when the guys are trying to get out of the facility for their night off, but one nice thing about this job is that sometimes you get lucky.

Players walk by where I sit fairly often - they have to pass me to get to the PR and HR offices, two places they all need to visit occasionally - but they don't always have the time or inclination to stop and chat. Today, though, the person Antwaan Randle El was hoping to see was out of the office (freeing up his time), and he was distracted by the tempting chocolate/hazelnut eggs in my desk-neighbor's authentic German Kinder Überraschungs advent calendar (leading him to stop and stay for a bit).

He kindly agreed to take some time and answer this pressing question, which I figured would prevent me from having to offer the dumb glib answer I had initially come up with.

So what, exactly, do you wide receivers do in practice?

"Run. Run, run, run. That's all we do." [So much for that hope.]