Raiders latest NFL team to carry burden of 'Hard Knocks'

In the final piece published by veteran NFL writer Don Banks, who died at 57 in his sleep over the weekend, last year’s subject of the “Hard Knocks” TV franchise expressed reservations about being featured on the annual documentary series.

With this year’s season of the show set to begin Tuesday featuring the Raiders, it’s instructive to see how being featured on it can adversely affect a team. While Todd Haley and Hue Jackson are gone from Cleveland’s coaching staff, they sounded off in the piece about how the inclusion of a scene with them arguing with now-head coach Freddie Kitchens proved disruptive to the team.

In another key scene, Haley argues with Jackson about how the Browns should have approached practicing, as it differed from how the Steelers, Haley’s former employer, went about it. Jackson in the scene more or less big-timed Haley, shutting him down with an appeal to authority as head coach. Haley told Banks that Jackson practically reveled in having cameras around and that took away from the focus of turning around a woebegone team.

There’s reason to take that with a grain of salt given their clashing over the half season before both were dismissed. But even Kitchens acknowledges that he wouldn’t be so open with the show if it returned to cover the Browns again during his tenure.

“‘Hard Knocks’ is only going to affect you if you let it affect you,’’ Kitchens told Banks. “The people at NFL Films, those folks are great to work with. But people have a hard time making sure those cameras don’t affect them. Because they see the cameras everywhere. So sometimes you don’t always get the truth. You get coaches and players playing up to the camera instead of just the truth.

 “If you’re truly asking the players to be all about the team, I would say ‘Hard Knocks’ makes it very difficult to do. Because those cameras are always looking for someone to make a star out of.’’  

Two out of the last three seasons, the head coach hasn’t survived until the end of the year. In fact, in the series’ well-decorated history, the only head coach who is still employed by the team that did “Hard Knocks” is Houston’s Bill O’Brien, whose Texans were featured in 2015. Feel free to draw your own conclusions about that trend.

In 2013, owners passed a rule that the league could compel one team to be the subject of the series if none came forward to volunteer. That was likely in response to the fact that 2011 was the only year the series did not air since 2007, when it became an annual fixture of the preseason. Most likely, that was in response to the explosive and infamous 2010 season featuring Rex Ryan’s New York Jets, which contained a number of profane and controversial moments that detractors were quick to note whenever the teams struggled.

There are a few exceptions to the league’s ability to compel teams. For instance, it can’t be any team with a first-year head coach, or one that has made the playoffs one of the last two seasons, nor can it be a team that has taken part in the series at some point over the past decade.

There’s quite a bit in there that suggests being the show’s subject is a problem. For instance, why worry about first-year coaches if the show isn’t at least somewhat of an extra burden? And there’s little way of looking at the playoff proviso other than to view an appearance on the show as incentive to do better, or a punishment for not being exciting or competitive enough.

The NFL is fully aware of the marketing potential of “Hard Knocks” as another celebrated part of the league’s calendar, even if teams have learned to be wary of it, and as a result has made the show less explosive than some of its early years. If it’s somewhat damaging to one team, the league figures, well, it’s just one season out of a decade, and all the more reason for the other 31 teams to avoid that fate.