Like It or Not, the Aaron Rodgers Era Gets the Hard Knocks Treatment

“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.