Hard Knocks is back for another season starting next week.
This year, the show will at the very least have a solid anchor to begin the season, as the cameras follow the reigning Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks as they prepare to defend their title. While recent seasons of Hard Knocks have been criticized for being watered down, Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald appears to be at least presenting as fully open to the documentary process.
“The way I’m thinking about it is like this, we talked about it in the spring—this is a gift from the football gods,” Macdonald told his team at a meeting in a new promo for the upcoming season. “I’m one of the most awkward guys in the history of America. I used to worry all the time about ‘What were they going to think of me?’ and ‘No, no, no. I don’t want to say the wrong thing.’ Screw it. It doesn’t matter. All I’m worried about is creating the best football team we can possibly create, and I want to make sure that we are us all the time. That’s all I care about.”
HBO’s Hard Knocks has taken NFL fans inside training camp since 2001. Since then, the series has grown in some ways, and shrunk in others.
HBO has built spin-offs of the show that take viewers inside both the regular NFL season and the high-stakes decisions made in the offseason. However, teams are much more media-trained as a whole than they were more than two decades ago, and the show has, by many accounts, lost much of the bite that made it such a special look inside the machinations of the NFL when it initially debuted.
Teams and their executives are not big fans of Hard Knocks, and that trepidation has only grown since the fallout the Giants suffered after their offseason run on the show in 2024. It’s not hard to see why. Making a high-stakes decision in the NFL is stressful enough on its own—making it with cameras on you and accidentally producing a clip that lives on in another team’s highlight package for the rest of eternity is a different kind of pain.
We won’t know how casual the Seahawks are actually going to be with the cameras following them until the show starts airing. If Macdonald truly is not going to care about the cameras following the team’s journey through camp, cuts and the preseason, we could be in for a solid return to form for the show. If not, the Liev Schreiber voiceover work will still be worth the price of admission, at least for my money.
This season of Hard Knocks premieres on Tuesday, August 4. You can watch the trailer below.
