Anyone that has been paying attention for the last decade has seen the cracks forming. Now there is no denying it. Hard Knocks is at a crossroads and there may be no coming back.
HBO and NFL Films are reportedly considering the upcoming installment will focus on a major NFL name, but not an NFL team. Instead, cameras will get access to Bill Belichick and his new players at the University of North Carolina.
Tar Heel football has nowhere near the caché that Tar Heel basketball enjoys, but I understand that football fans from all over the country have some level of curiosity. They want to see if Belichick will crash and burn in college or if he will come in and immediately run roughshod over the ACC.
I have lived in North Carolina for twenty years. Believe me when I tell you that Belichick may be irrelevant to what the team accomplishes. History suggests that most years, the University of North Carolina will field a 6-6 or 7-5 football team regardless of who is in charge. Admittedly, that 2025 schedule is softer than your most huggable teddy bear. It would take real effort to find four losses.
This column isn’t about the Tar Heels or Bill Belichick though. It’s about Hard Knocks and how quickly any brand can come crashing back to Earth because it stayed flat while the world around it changed.
Hard Knocks Then vs Now
When it debuted in 2001, Hard Knocks was a novel approach to entertaining sports fans. Reality TV was still a novel concept, really. Remember, it was less than two years earlier that Survivor moved the format beyond the borders of MTV. HBO was able to sell the show as prestige programming in 2001.
Think about what was on the network at that time – Oz, Six Feet Under, and maybe the greatest drama ever made, The Sopranos (another contender for that title, The Wire, would launch the next year). Even its sports programming felt special. Real Sports and On the Record with Bob Costas are two of the best sports studio shows ever, and HBO’s live sports footprint was in boxing, where its chief competition was pay-per-view events.
If Hard Knocks occupied the same airwaves, it must have been special. And maybe it was. It took fans into the locker room for some of a team’s most intimate moments.
Not only was the concept new to viewers. It was also new to the men the cameras followed. Tim Hasselbeck once admitted that he thought he was involved in a scripted moment when he was cut by the Baltimore Ravens during the show’s first season. It didn’t make sense otherwise. Why would the NFL or HBO want to embarrass him like that? That very real and very painful moment didn’t belong on television for strangers to see.
But that was then. This is now. Watching a player get cut is a throw away moment now in every season of the show. We live in a world where screens are everywhere and as a culture, we have decided that the stuff that “doesn’t belong” on them is just about all we want to see.
NFL Teams/Social Media Have Caught On
Hard Knocks doesn’t really fit in that kind of world. The ubiquity of cameras has not only devalued the content, it has also made coaches and front offices more paranoid than ever. Just think about all of the compromises sold as innovations that NFL Films has had to make just to keep the show going – right down to strong arming teams into participating.
Filming what is going behind the scenes and getting access are two different things. Those cameras don’t matter if everyone involved with the team is putting on a facade, being careful not to say or do anything too interesting.
Pat McAfee once argued that social media had made Hard Knocks irrelevant, and he’s right. Teams are producing their own documentaries in house. If the message is controlled anyway, you probably prefer the shorter, more frequent uploads to YouTube, Instagram and TikTok to Hard Knocks’ five-week deep dive.
It’s not only social media. Athletes’ own production companies are cutting into the pie too. Two years ago, Patrick Mahomes’s Quarterback stole the spotlight from Hard Knocks and won acclaim largely because it felt more intimate than what HBO and NFL Films had to offer that season.
A pivot was always coming. NFL Films had to decide what that would be though. Would Hard Knocks tinker with its familiar formula or would the league pivot away from the concept entirety?
Shifting the focus to a college football program, an historically awful one at that, feels like the worst of both worlds. Even with Bill Belichick’s involvement, Hard Knocks has gone from the blueprint to an inferior version of an all-too-common product.
Maybe HBO and the NFL can rest a little easier knowing that FOX Nation doesn’t have enough subscribers to produce a real hit, but if you are asking a casual fan to choose between the North Carolina Tar Heels on Hard Knocks or the Alabama Crimson Tide on The Tides That Bind, don’t you think an average person is more likely to pick the national brand every time? The FOX Nation show is just one of many competitors in the college football behind-the-scenes space too.
That’s the thing. Hard Knocks was clearly in need of an overhaul. I’m just not sure that the one it chose makes much sense. After all, paranoia and social media staffs are in college football buildings too.
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Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
