The Pittsburgh Steelers will be featured on HBO’s Hard Knocks during the in-season edition of the series along with the rest of the AFC North. That will take place over the final six weeks of the season. It is the first time in the show’s history that an entire division is being featured.
The Steelers have always held their cards pretty close to their chest and have handled a lot of their business behind closed doors and out of the prying eyes of the media. Hard Knocks will be the opposite of that with unfettered access to the inner workings of the organization.
The NFL and HBO have a way to force teams to be on the show if they meet certain criteria. The Steelers have largely avoided meeting that criteria with their long run of sustained success. This full-division edition of the show circumvents those rules. Mike Tomlin offered up his reaction to being included in the show during his opening press conference at training camp.
“It’s so far off. I don’t know that I have a reaction to this point,” Tomlin said in a video posted on the Steelers’ YouTube page. “I hadn’t had any pertinent meetings regarding the logistical component of it and things of that nature. Just to give you a blanket statement, I’m not overly concerned about it, to be quite honest with you. The people that we compete most intimately with are faced with the same issues. So from that standpoint, it’s fair.”
Without fully knowing what Hard Knocks will entail for the Steelers and their day-to-day operations, Tomlin has a pretty neutral stance on being involved. It would be one thing if it was just focusing on the Steelers, but the rest of the AFC North will be dealing with the same thing.
The way the schedule is laid out, the Steelers will be playing the Cincinnati Bengals twice, the Baltimore Ravens once, and the Cleveland Browns once during that span. They will also have a Christmas day game against the Kansas City Chiefs and a road game against the Philadelphia Eagles. That stretch of games will be difficult enough, but the added media circus has the potential to create distractions.
Had the Steelers been featured in the final six weeks of the 2023 season, Hard Knocks would have captured the three-game losing streak and the unusually tumultuous media narratives that followed. The difficult final six games that the Steelers have on their schedule has the potential to get tense.
Cameron Heyward and Christian Kuntz gave their reaction to Hard Knocks on a recent episode of Heyward’s Not Just Football podcast. They expressed concern over words getting taken out of context and players being portrayed in a negative light because of it.
We will see if Tomlin changes his tune once he has a better idea of the logistics.
