Portis's Latest Role: Adulthood

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Redskins Unrestricted: July 22

The Washington Post's Jason Reid discusses the details of the team's first day of training camp.

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Portis had a list of injuries that ruined his 2006 season. Entering last year, he had somehow become viewed as a brittle superstar who could break down at anytime. In a league where explosive, young backs with big contracts have become disposable (see Shaun Alexander), Portis was a monstrous question mark. But he played all 16 games last season, rushing for nearly 1,300 yards and 11 touchdowns. Just as he predicted midway through an awful stretch of losses, he put the Redskins on his back and moved the pile forward. Surprising, no? Another 1,300-yard season, and John Riggins will be the only running back in franchise history with more yards than Portis.

He's not done; he never was.

"They write me off every year, thinkin' there's a new hope," Portis said. "Adrian Peterson got more hype than anybody in the NFL right now after a rookie year where he had 1,300 yards.

"He ran hard," he said of the Vikings' rookie last year. "He played great. But my rookie year I had 1,500 yards. My stats was way better than Adrian Peterson's. Adrian Peterson is playing behind the best line in the NFL right now. But it's what the outside world thinks. Reggie Bush had all the hype in the world. He probably still got all the hype in the world."

Portis said he has no career regrets, adding that the injuries to his shoulder and a broken hand two seasons ago were "the best things that could have possibly happened to me."

"At the time I was tired of football," he added. "The passion for football really wasn't there. The energy for football really wasn't there. So it took me being away from the game to get that appreciation and realize what it meant."

He's been talking up his new teammates and Jim Zorn's offense since training camp began, sounding like a player who was liberated from counter-trey captivity. "Over the past five years I have been playing tough-man football and probably knocked six years off my career," he said.

"I don't think people really watch football," Portis added. "Because what we did as a football team was tough. It was tough on all of us. People don't understand how it beats up on your body. They understand the yardage total. They understand how it look. I did what I was asked to do.

"They asked me run into a brick wall with 11 people standing there, I ran into a brick wall with 11 people standing there. Now I got the opportunity to change the scheme. I feel good, I look good and I'm excited about it."

The sacrifice to play in Gibbs's offense, he said, also helped him understand something about himself.

"What Coach Gibbs did for me was to make me grow up and understand everything in life ain't goin' be fine and dandy," Portis said. "There's going to be hard times, there's going to be battles and you got to fight through them. You not going to win every battle, but you going to fight every battle. What that instilled in me is the confidence to know I never gave up and I never would give up.

"I think my tougher years are behind me," he added. "I really do think that, because every week it was, 'We're going to battle, this is a war.' It's not a tactic to shoot over their heads and out. It's, 'We goin' line up, you goin' buckle your helmet, put your mouthpiece in, get your chin strap fixed and we goin' mano y mano.' I did that."