In fact Gibbs, in year four of a five-year contract in his second stint with the Washington Redskins, learned that vanilla wasn’t for him a year ago at this time.

It was back then that Gibbs and the other 20 or so whistle-blowers on his coaching staff took a very vanilla approach throughout the preseason. Training-camp practices were short, rarely involved pads and entailed hitting even less. Even the team’s preseason games were vanilla, as the offense and defense used the same elementary schemes and trimmed-down playbooks.

The thought was that regular-season rivals, who wouldn’t have any film to study based on Washington’s watered-down efforts during the preseason, wouldn’t know what to expect.

Eleven losses, a last-place finish and a year later, Gibbs and his staff have amended the way they are approaching the preseason, and this time, the Redskins should have about as much in common with vanilla as chocolate.

“When we saw how things played out last year, coach [Gibbs] told us that things would be different when we got going again,” Renaldo Wynn said. “He told us that we were going to have a tough training camp, and that things would be a lot more physical.”

Chris Cooley, a tight end who caught 57 passes and scored six touchdowns in 2006, went as far as calling last year’s team “soft” when addressing the preseason workout regimens.

“The first day into training camp, the one thing Gibbs said was that we were going be a more physical team going into this season,” Cooley said.

“We went into last season soft,” he said. “We didn’t block people or run the ball until about half way through, and then we made a big adjustment. We started running the ball, and that’s what a Gibbs team needs to do to win games. That’s what we’ve got to do.”

The increase in physicality at the team’s practice sessions was on display last week in Ashburn.

How much more difficult has this season’s camp been for the players? They’ve already had five two-a-days, two more than in all of last year’s camp.

“More than any other camp, we’re just more physical,” said Wynn, one of the team’s elder statesmen. “There’s not going to be any secrets about what we want to do. We want to come out and play smash-mouth football, and it starts out here in camp with these two-a-days.”

Getting back to the playoffs won’t be easy for the Redskins, whose defense was the NFL’s second-worst last year. But they won’t spend the early part of the season searching for an identity, one of Washington’s problems a year ago.