It is as time honored a seasonal tradition as the blooming of begonias and allium flowers: The NFL and its thirsty network of media partners are still trying to find someone to take on Hard Knocks. According to ProFootballTalk, the Commanders keep raising their hands, but even the most sadistic professional sports league on Earth isn’t willing to subject the viewing public to something so obviously horrendous.
It brings up an interesting question and follow-up question. First: What are teams so afraid of? Second: How have they not figured out how to do their time with the series gracefully and simply be done with it no worse for the ware? Not everyone has to be the 2018 Browns, for example, having their head coach and offensive coordinator passive aggressively undermining each other like a pair of territorial middle-managers. Not every team has to be subject to the curse of the docuseries, which so often automatically means its subject will miss the playoffs, or have enough meme-able content surfaced via HBO’s intrusive cameras to bury itself alive.
Attention, paranoid coaches and their unoriginal PR underlings: There is an answer. There are solutions. When Hard Knocks comes rapping at your door, don’t panic, don’t threaten, don’t cut a side deal with Roger Goodell, allowing him personal access to everyone’s DraftKings account. Just follow these three easy steps for a conflict-free summer of boring television, the kind you don’t have to run away from kicking and screaming.
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Kirthmon F. Dozier/USA TODAY Network
Step 1: Create the illusion of some faux competition that is ultimately meaningless
I was once told by someone in this business to base the entirety of my training camp coverage on “position battles,” which always seemed funny to me. There may ultimately end up being a small handful of spots on a given roster that aren’t politically accounted for. Outside of a few teams, there are rarely the kind of meritocracies that lend themselves to a docuseries without the aid of some untimely injury that sends a club scrambling. As a football-consuming public, though, we’ve come to believe that it’s true. So, we want to be fed what we ordered.
Which is why, as a team, you simply create one to distract the entire Hard Knocks crew from anything truly nefarious that might be going on inside your building.
The battle for the right to be the punt gunner. The sixth offensive lineman. The backup quarterback. Set up a couple of rubes; a Midwestern second-chance high draft pick who is staring down a life of baling hay versus a powerful but raw prospect from the American Samoa rugby union developmental program. Send the Hard Knocks cameras sprawling across the country to gather their backstories. Keep them busy while knowing full well that you will cut both of them and eventually play the third-round pick from Kent State your general manager keeps telling the owner is better than the coach is making him out to be.
As the author Don DeLillo wrote in his masterpiece Libra:
“Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.”
Step 2: Prominently feature someone with a ridiculous interest or skill set who can filibuster mass quantities of time while harboring no expectation that they’ll actually play on the football team
Speaking of the 2018 Browns, remember the tight end who was obsessed with crystals? Sticking him in front of the camera to obscure a franchise that couldn’t decide whether to draft Myles Garrett or Mitch Trubisky was unquestionably the most genius part of their “plan” to rediscover football greatness.
For a coach who is fretting about Hard Knocks (the Jets, Saints and Bears are the other teams that could be strong-armed into doing it), why not just sign a third kicker who would willingly bhangra dance to midfield and then tearfully perform “Who Am I?” from Les Misérables while the rest of the team is doing whatever it is you’d fear HBO would put on camera? There are millions of lay folks out there eager to debase themselves for a chance to appear on television for free. You don’t think that truism applies to a smaller segment of the football-playing population? Think of it as a handshake agreement: The player gets a chance to showcase their skills, be it competitive egg cracking or breath holding (PSA: no one is touching the GOAT, Budimir Šobat) and in return they keep the cameras completely distracted from that obvious bit of infighting that is currently souring your locker room.
Imagine staging a peaceful practice on a desolate third field somewhere deep in the recesses of your taxpayer-funded practice facility, while the backup kick holder, a former American Ninja Warrior, films a parkour tutorial out back. The content Gods would be satisfied, and so, too, would your coaching desire for complete military-style secrecy.
Here are a few suggested subplots, the lot of which you could pay some wayward actor to live out on camera to soak up the attention:
• A player who has never once washed his hands.
• A player who worships Simon Camden from 7th Heaven as an actual deity.
• A player who gets the bulk of his cardio from a giant hamster wheel.
• A player who believes he is related to Pat Sajak.
Step 3: Teach your coaching staff an obscure dialect of Mandarin and contractually disallow subtitles
Afraid some hot, rising assistant is going to steal the show? Afraid that he or she may say something absolutely ridiculous, usurp your authority, steal too much camera time or accidentally reveal a state secret?
Imagine your offensive coordinator patrolling the sidelines and barking out calls in a Sino-Tibetan language known mostly to inhabitants of Southeast Asia.
How long before the flustered camera people and producers grow tired and go find that kicker who sings Les Mis?
Either way, it’s better than seeing the Commanders.
In truth, like much else in the NFL, good franchises don’t have much to worry about. A team secure in the personnel it picks and confident in its coaching staff won’t see its fortunes change much or have its season ruined. Hard Knocks is mostly just a mirror held up for a team to look at if it so chooses, which is why, I’m sure, going the route of complete and total deception seems more appealing.
There are some legitimately interesting discussions about where the show fits into the football content universe right now. With more organizations than ever mosquitoing their way into the league’s bloodstream (and almost every team doing a version of Hard Knocks perpetually in-house with all the editorial freedom of the Russian State News Agency) they can constantly present the facade of a well-functioning organization without the fear of a wart becoming visible via a somewhat objective third party.
Gone are the days of Rex Ryan screaming at Darrelle Revis’s agent or a horrifyingly talented Ravens team all wearing bucket hats emblazoned with the logo of a questionable sports performance nutrition company making fun of one another.
We don’t know what the future holds, but we do know that, when it comes to having your practices filmed and a few of your players interviewed, it doesn’t have to be as complicated as teams are making it out to be.
