With his team readying for a title defense, Brian Billick thought it was the right time for a close-up. In 2001, fresh off coaching the Baltimore Ravens to a win in the Super Bowl, Billick was approached with a pitch from Steve Sabol, the late cofounder of NFL Films.
With his team readying for a title defense, Brian Billick thought it was the right time for a close-up. In 2001, fresh off coaching the Baltimore Ravens to a win in the Super Bowl, Billick was approached with a pitch from Steve Sabol, the late cofounder of NFL Films.
Sabol’s proposal came straight out of the reality-television playbook that was beginning to dominate programming in the early 2000s. He wanted to deploy a film crew to embed with the Ravens during preseason training camp, capturing fly-on-the-wall footage from practices and meetings, in the locker room and training room, at the team cafeteria and in the players’ own kitchens. The footage would then be used in episodes airing each week in the run-up to the regular season.
It was poised to be a tough sell to any of the NFL’s head coaches, a fraternity of control freaks who use training camp to install a playbook and dispel distractions. “Your first thought as a coach is: Hell no, I’m not going to do that,” Billick told me over the phone. But after conferring with others in the Ravens’ front office, Billick began to see the merits of the production. He became convinced that it could be a spark for a mid-Atlantic team still in its infancy after relocating from Cleveland to Baltimore five years prior.
“We’re a small-market team in Baltimore, shoved between DC and Philly, and, at the time, a very new brand, so to speak,” Billick said. “It was a great way to bring exposure to the organization, particularly on the heels of the Super Bowl.” Billick also liked the idea of showcasing the personalities on the defending champion Ravens, a roster that included outspoken future Hall of Famers Ray Lewis and Shannon Sharpe. And Billick saw the project as a means to a competitive edge, believing that the constant presence of a film crew would keep players sharp. “If you don’t do it in training camp,” Billick recalled thinking at the time, “we’re going to let the whole world see.”
With the Ravens on board, the NFL had a future hit: On August 1, 2001, the inaugural edition of Hard Knocks premiered. More than two decades later, the show endures as an annual rite of late-summer, a harbinger of the coming football season and a tentpole series for both the league and its broadcasting partner, HBO. Even within the NFL’s ever-expanding documentary portfolio, Hard Knocks is still the signature franchise. Every year, it serves as a monthlong, contemporaneous chronicle of the ecstasy of making the team and the agony of getting released, all accompanied by the dulcet narration of Liev Schreiber. The show’s success led to the creation of an in-season spin-off, which aired each of the last two years and will continue this season. This year’s preseason edition of Hard Knocks, which premieres on Tuesday and will feature the New York Jets and their new talk-of-the-town quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, will be the 18th in the show’s history.
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“Hard Knocks has been inherent in the DNA here for the last 20 years,” said Ross Ketover, a senior executive at NFL Films. “There’s a lot of places that have acted like they’ve invented this access genre recently, but we’ve been doing this since 2001.”
Ahead of Tuesday’s premiere, it’s clear that few coaches embrace the show like Billick did. As training camp approached this summer, the NFL struggled to find a team willing to step into the spotlight. Under the league’s rules, there were four teams that could have been required to participate in the show: the New York Jets, Chicago Bears, New Orleans Saints, and Washington Commanders. The Jets, Bears, and Saints all made it clear to anyone who would listen that they weren’t interested. “I know there’s several teams that would love for Hard Knocks to be in their building,” Jets head coach Robert Saleh said in June. “We’re just not one of them.” (The Commanders were apparently game to do it but the league reportedly passed due to the pending sale of the team, which was finalized last month.)
After reportedly widening its search beyond those four teams, the league selected the Jets, and the team was not thrilled. “They forced it down our throats, and we’ve got to deal with it,” Rodgers said last month. ESPN’s resident NFL insider Adam Schefter reported that the Jets were “not going to provide the level of cooperation” as other teams have previously on Hard Knocks. The Jets, as Schefter put it, were “not interested in being partners with NFL Films.”
But since NFL Films sent crews to the Jets practice facility in Florham Park, NJ, peace appears to be at hand. Saleh made light of the controversy by showing up to a press conference last month in a T-shirt that said, “I [heart] HK.”
Hard Knocks’ lead creative producer Ken Rodgers (no relation to Aaron), told me that it’s been business as usual with the Jets. “It’s been going great,” Rodgers said. “I think viewers will watch and feel the same access that they get on every Hard Knocks.” Rodgers said the resistance to the show this summer was “overblown in the media,” and he pushes back against the notion that teams are forced into doing Hard Knocks. As Rodgers sees it, participation in the show is no different than scheduling a team to play on Thursday Night Football or in one of the NFL’s annual London games.
“It’s not like walking across the room and asking a girl to dance with you at the prom,” Rodgers said. “If you asked coaches, ‘Hey, would you like to play on Thursday Night Football or would you like to play in London?’ Most of them would say, ‘No, I’ll pass.’ Part of their job is to get rid of variables and have things working like a machine.”
That Rodgers likens Hard Knocks to something as fundamental as schedule-making speaks to how the league and its in-house film studio view the show. Eager to capitalize on the sports-doc boom, NFL Films has been in greenlight mode after announcing last year that it was partnering with Skydance Media to “create the premier global multi-sports production studio in the industry.” The two sides are teaming up to produce a docuseries on Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones that the league reportedly sold to Netflix for around $50 million. Last month, Netflix released The Quarterback, an eight-episode docuseries from NFL Films and Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions.
But Ketover said he still treats Hard Knocks as “one of our biggest games of the season.” The league and HBO agreed to a four-year extension in 2020 to continue making the show, and Ketover signaled that the partnership is likely to continue once the deal is up after next year. “We love our relationship with HBO and look to continue that,” he said. In fact, Ketover told me that HBO’s place in the Warner Bros. Discovery corporate family makes the league “want to do more with that company.”
Rodgers, meanwhile, has his own visions of expansion.
“I expect at some point every team will appear on Hard Knocks,” he said.
Unlike the Jets this year, Billick and the Ravens were not cornered into doing Hard Knocks. “We absolutely could have said no,” Billick said.
But in the fall of 2013, the NFL’s owners approved a rule authorizing the league to compel a team to participate in Hard Knocks every year. Earlier that year, the league had difficulty finding a team willing to do the show before choosing the Cincinnati Bengals, which had appeared on Hard Knocks previously.
The NFL continues to seek volunteers, but under the rule, a team is only exempt if it has a first-year head coach, if it’s made the playoffs in the last two seasons, or if it has participated in the series in the previous 10 seasons. Any team that doesn’t meet at least one of those conditions could be summoned for Hard Knocks duty.
“It was to make sure that we would never have a year when no one volunteered and the show didn’t happen,” Rodgers said. “The owners made the decision that this is a show that will be produced every year because it’s so positive for the league.”
Hard Knocks was not always viewed as a recurring series. There was a second season in 2002 that centered around the Cowboys, but production of the show went dark after that. “We felt we had done the show and it was like, ‘Okay, we did that now. Now what’s next?’” Rodgers recalled. “We didn’t realize that it was such a sustainable model.”
Rodgers, who joined NFL Films in 2001 and served as a segment producer for season two of Hard Knocks, spent the next several years pushing his bosses to revive the series. “It was revolutionary. I’m not saying that I foresaw what it would become, but it was so different in the sports space,” he said. “It was really the dawn of reality television.”
Sabol eventually came around and the series relaunched in 2007 with a spotlight on the Kansas City Chiefs. The belated third season was narrated by Chiefs diehard Paul Rudd, making it the only edition of Hard Knocks that isn’t accompanied by Schreiber’s voiceover. Rodgers, meanwhile, has been lead creative producer of the series ever since.
The NFL and HBO have long billed Hard Knocks as “the first sports-based reality series,” but the format is easily recognizable today. Social media is awash in behind-the-scenes locker-room footage and clips of players mic’d up on the field, and the sports-documentary space has never been more saturated.
Given the ubiquity of the style, it can be easy to forget that Hard Knocks remains a pretty extraordinary piece of television––less for the access, but more for the breakneck pace of its production schedule. Rodgers said the film crew gathers up to 450 hours of footage a week, all of which is filmed and edited through Monday before getting culled down to a one-hour episode that airs on Tuesday.
“People will talk to me on Tuesday nights and say, ‘That was a great show. What’s going to be on next week?’” Rodgers said. “And I say, I have no idea, it hasn’t happened yet.”
Sabol used to say that making the show was akin to building an airplane in flight, but there is a rhythm to Hard Knocks that has made it less daunting than other docuseries of its ilk. Rodgers said each edition of the series has a “clear beginning, middle, and end” that dovetails with the NFL’s preseason schedule: Players report to camp, suit up for a few meaningless games, and wait for the final 53-man roster to be announced. Hard Knocks has also developed a routine that can, at times, veer into sameness.
Rodgers said that he and his team “fight to make sure that familiarity doesn’t turn into staleness.” He compares Hard Knocks to Survivor, a reality-TV contemporary that premiered in 2000 and remains a fixture on CBS’s lineup. Both shows, Rodgers said, are “familiar and fresh,” combining a familiar template with new characters. (Survivor has had many seasons featuring past contestants, but the point is taken.)
But like an actual NFL team, the success of any Hard Knocks season generally comes down to the players and coaches who are on it. The 2010 edition of the show also featured the Jets, and stands out as one of the best in the series, not least because of then head coach Rex Ryan’s indelible sound bite: “Let’s go eat a goddamn snack!” Last summer’s Hard Knocks with the Detroit Lions was mostly well-received, particularly for the appearances of its swashbuckling head coach, Dan Campbell.
But even with colorful personalities like Ryan or Campbell involved, the show doesn’t get too spicy. Hard Knocks is a property of the NFL, after all, and the league is militant when it comes to protecting its brand. To some, that has made the show into “infomercial fluff,” as a writer for the Detroit Free-Press put it in a review of Hard Knocks last year.
Rodgers said participating teams are able to screen each episode before it airs, but that is mostly to ensure that it includes no revealing details about play calls. “We don’t try to spin things to make people look worse, and we don’t even spin things to make people look better,” Rodgers said. “We didn’t say last year how great of a coach Dan Campbell is or how great of a leader [he is]. We just showed him for who he was and people decided, by watching him, how great he was.”
Traditional TV ratings for Hard Knocks have dropped in recent years. But Rodgers said those numbers don’t capture how much of the show’s audience has migrated to the streaming-verse. According to Rodgers, a much higher percentage of viewers watch Hard Knocks on Max than on linear HBO. “Our audience is just as strong as it was [during] the boom years,” he told me.
Billick, for his part, said he hasn’t kept up with the series. “I think we did set the template and they seem to be just a repeat of what we did,” he said. Billick stopped coaching in the NFL following the 2007 regular season, almost six years before the league approved the Hard Knocks mandate. Back when he was leading the Ravens, Billick had a go-to response when the NFL tried to force teams to do certain things: “Well, does Bill have to do it?”
By “Bill,” he means Bill Belichick, the immortal (and imposing) coach of the New England Patriots.
“They can say, ‘Well, the league can mandate it,’ but until they make New England and Bill Belichick do it, then no, they’re not making anybody do it,” Billick said.
The Patriots have been exempt from Hard Knocks thanks to the team’s consistent postseason appearances in the Belichick and Tom Brady era. But Belichick has opened his doors to a film crew before. He was mic’d up for the 2009 season, which was documented by NFL Films for the first two episodes of its long-running series, A Football Life.
“When people say it’ll never happen, I say, well, it’s already happened,” Rodgers said of Belichick.
We may find out sooner rather than later. If Belichick were to fall short of the playoffs for the second season in a row, the Patriots would be out of exemptions and, potentially, on the short list for the show next summer.
Hard Knocks: New England? I’d watch.
