Take a look at the output of:
# ifconfig
This will show both your rl0 and rl1 NICs, and you may then compare the physical layer status of each. DHCP will fail if there is no Ethernet connectivity. See
http://www.daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=6184 for a recent thread on this subject.
Ocicat was faster than I was, but he's right, a dmesg will also be helpful. Watchdog timeouts occur when drivers fail to get responses from hardware when expected.