For obvious reasons, there were a lot of quotes coming out of the Redskins locker room today that dealt with owner Daniel Snyder's statement yesterday that he feels disappointed and embarrassed with the first half of the season. That was not a surprise.

Santana Moss discusses the owner feeling disappointed:
"I think we all are. It's not a good feeling to be who we are and where we are right now. We know it's people out there that pay a lot of money and that respect what we've been trying to do, and you hate to let 'em down. But at the same time, I hope they understand that we're not TRYING to, you know what I mean?"

If there was one thing that was clear during open locker room and the first portion of practice today, it's that the players on the team are actually loose and ready to go. The oppressive tension and electricity that characterized Monday were gone, and ... honestly, the mood around here hasn't seemed this pleasant in more than a month.

"Its hopeful," Clinton Portis told the assembled media. "Everybody in the locker room is still showing hope. We have a tough opponent coming in this week, and we know they coming in here ready to win. We have to find a way to fight. We're going to be on prime time television Monday night. We haven't done good really this season; here is the time to turn it around."

The official word on this week's quarterback situation is still "TBD" -- which may actually be an acronym and not a word -- but ESPN's Matt Mosley, author of the always-informative NFC (B)East blog, begs to differ.

Jason Campbell will get the start at quarterback this week for the Washington Redskins, a league source told ESPN.com's Matt Mosley on Monday.

The Redskins play a high-profile Monday night game against the Philadelphia Eagles on Oct. 26.

As that high-profile game will take place on ESPN's Monday Night Football, their reporters are certainly going to be alert to stories that potentially have an effect on it.

That said, you'll still have to wait until sometime later this week -- no later than Thursday's practice -- to see if Mosley's unofficial word matches up with the official one. It's kind of like a lottery scratcher, only without the second chance drawing. Or the prizes.

It's one of the great truisms of professional football that the backup quarterback is the most popular guy in town. This is because the backup quarterback represents hope, change, the belief that one minor switch can reverse a season that's rapidly heading south.

But the backup QB is like the old quantum physics thought experiment about Schroedinger's cat. Stripping out the details, what you essentially do is construct a situation in which a cat in a box has a precisely 50-50 shot of being dead or alive -- and, for as long as that box is sealed, the cat can be considered both dead AND alive. As soon as you open the box, though, the possibilities all collapse into a single truth: either the cat is dead, or he's alive. The end.

Well, the Redskins opened the box last night to see how Todd Collins was doing, and the results were ... mixed.

Santana Moss wasn't the only Redskins player doing his part for charity on Tuesday. Clinton Portis partnered with Becky's Fund and Eric Finn Custom Clothiers to host Walk This Way, an event to benefit victims of domestic violence. The event took place on the rooftop of the Liaison Hotel in D.C.; a runway had been built in the rooftop pool, and Portis and Jason Campbell both appeared as models during the fashion show component.

It would be easy to just write about this as a Hey-These-Guys-Were-Models-For-A-Night -- and I'll get to that, no doubt -- but Portis took the event extremely seriously. When I asked him about it the day before, he talked at length about the importance of stopping domestic violence. When I asked him about the modeling component that night, he talked about the seriousness of the cause. He talked to TV cameras about the cause.

There are a lot of commenters here who like to speculate about Jason Campbell. About his intelligence, about his leadership abilities, and most of all about his relationship with head coach Jim Zorn. And I can insist that Campbell is better than people suspect in every one of those categories; I can write it until my hands cramp up and I can't type any more, but it was always tough to present evidence to the contrary beyond anecdotal evidence.

Fortunately, NFL Films had both Campbell and Zorn miked up during Sunday's game, and this resulting video makes things much clearer in just five minutes. It also makes me feel a lot better about the Rams game as a whole. Just fascinating stuff all around.



You can watch it in even higher resolution at NFL.com, but the most impressive parts come through loud and clear here:

When last we visited our intrepid team captains, they had assembled for their group photo only to find that Jason Campbell was wearing a suit that was several shades too light. Today, they tried again.


Much better. Success! And no one even had anything sarcastic to say afterward, even when I asked.

"Jason got enough of it last time," Mike Sellers said.

Then he stopped to think for a minute and corrected himself:

"No, as a matter of fact, I do have something to say."

Remember last year's team captains photo? The one where Cornelius Griffin said his teammates told the six captains "You look gangster'? Well, today was scheduled to be the updated version, and -- largely thanks to Jason Campbell's choice of ensembles -- things did not go exactly as planned.


"You know, there's nothing gangster about what Jason's got on right now," said Mike Sellers, a first-year captain. "Everybody wore their dark suits, but Jason wore a light gray suit, which don't make no sense."

Here's a partial schedule of how postgame breaks down: the team gets a mandated cooling-off period before the media is allowed in. The first part of that cooling-off period is given over to the head coach's postgame speech, which occurs behind closed doors; then, while the team starts showering, changing, and so on, the coach heads down the hall to hold his press conference.

I happened to be standing there when Jason Campbell was hustled from the field -- where he had been doing postgame TV interviews -- to the start of the cooling-off period, and Campbell appeared to be visibly limping, doing a hop-run to get into the locker room.

So I wasn't entirely surprised when head coach Jim Zorn got to the injury update portion of his press conference. After he got Randy Thomas's triceps out of the way ("We're going to take a look at it"), here's what he had to say:

I was disappointed that I missed the snake.

Toward the end of open locker room, a small snake slithered out from under Chris Wilson's locker, and ... here, I'll let John Keim of the Washington Examiner tell it:

"Somebody do something!" linebacker Chris Wilson said.

Stephon Heyer made several attempts to pick it up and carry it outside, though Mike Sellers chastised him because, "You don't know if it's poisonous!" Chris Samuels made the same point.

But Heyer managed to pick it up (it fell to the ground once and coiled up) and took it outside, gently setting it on the ground and letting it free.

Rich Campbell of the Free Lance Star was onhand to snap a picture; I missed the entire thing. This was a source of immense disappointment to me -- snake in the locker room! OMG! total blog gold! -- and I was kind of bummed out as I headed to my desk.

That all turned around when someone passed my desk and mentioned that LaRon Landry had a monkey waiting for him in the lobby.

The white-faced capuchin was just over two months old, wearing a leash and a diaper and clinging to a stuffed bear, chaperoned by two of Landry's friends, and he cheep-ed happily when Landry showed up.

"Just a thought over the offseason," Landry explained, when I asked why he'd gotten the monkey. "I didn't want nothin' too big. He'll get up to fifteen pounds, live 35 to 50 years. When I die, he can die with me."