Some NFL owners reportedly ‘aren’t thrilled’ with NFL Films featuring Bill Belichick’s UNC on ‘Hard Knocks’
It sounds like there may be some NFL owners who prefer both not having cake and not eating it. The NFL Films/HBO Hard Knocks: Offseason series got an unlikely lifeline this past week after many NFL owners rejected the idea for their franchises, opting to pivot to the college ranks with new University of North Carolina Tar Heels head coach Bill Belichick’s first offseason in charge there. But, as per Mike Florio of NBC’s Pro Football Talk, at least some owners don’t like that idea:
Yes, Belichick may have “aggressively pursued” this, but it seems unlikely the program was going to make this pivot to the college level regardless of coach if NFL owners hadn’t turned them down. And yes, it’s somewhat understandable why owners weren’t totally keen on the Hard Knocks: Offseason concept following the rather-embarrassing way the inaugural version played out for the New York Giants, especially around Saquon Barkley’s move to the Philadelphia Eagles in free agency amidst owner John Mara’s stated misgivings. But there are plenty of ways Hard Knocks: Offseason could have worked for teams.
Indeed, there has been lots of past reporting suggesting that team “say over anything and everything” is rather standard for Hard Knocks. After all, all of the incarnations of that show come from NFL Films, and as such seemingly has no particular incentive to show up any of the league’s franchises.
There certainly are embarrassing-for-the-team moments on Hard Knocks. But those are often about team choices in what they allow to be filmed, what players, coaches and execs say with cameras rolling, and about what, if any, pushes the organizations make to cut things. (On that front, it’s fascinating that Hard Knocks: In Season, which seemingly has more potential than a preseason or training camp show to reveal information that could give a competitive advantage, especially around a division-wide show, has apparently not yet prompted this kind of controversy.
The larger issue for Hard Knocks has perhaps shown up in seasons where teams did restrict the NFL Films crews more than usual. That happened with the then-Oakland Raiders in 2019, and produced a product that was less appealing to some viewers. But it still had its moments, and still drew great numbers, and showed that teams can control what gets broadcast on some level. And yet, we’ve still wound up in a situation where seemingly only the teams that can be “forced” wind up doing the main training camp show, and where no one at all seemed to want to do the offseason show, leading to the pivot to college. (And on that front, some perhaps important context to this piece is the history of Florio’s coverage of Belichick at UNC and the pushback he’s drawn from Lombardi.)
There’s no reason to doubt Florio’s reporting on this Hard Knocks front. It of course makes sense that some NFL owners, a class that doesn’t appear to be to be big on Hard Knocks as a series (and maybe NFL Films overall, considering the way the league keeps talking about spinning off their media arm) or Belichick as a person at the moment, are wondering about a NFL Films series spotlighting Belichick and a college program. But there would have been an easy fix to avoid this: shutting up and doing Hard Knocks: Offseason. They chose not to do that, so it seems like quite sour grapes for them to whine about the show going to a program that would actually have it.
