If you’re a big fan of HBO’s Hard Knocks and the Pittsburgh Steelers, the next six weeks should be pretty exciting.
The in-season version of the show featuring the entire AFC North will begin on Tuesday. While all three of the other AFC North teams have been featured throughout the show’s history, including two appearances for the Cincinnati Bengals, the Steelers have eluded the invasive cameras littered throughout the team facility.
“We have probably 20 robo cameras in each of the [meeting] rooms,” said NFL Films director Terrell Riley via The Standard on the team’s YouTube page. “We also have our trailers that’s on the other side of the practice field. That’s where we kind of live for the next two, three months.”
The NFL teams have some level of control, but clearly not complete control. Just look at the offseason version of Hard Knocks with the New York Giants this past offseason. Many think that no team will ever sign up for that again after it documented letting Saquon Barkley walk in free agency and the team scouting quarterbacks while they had Daniel Jones under a considerable contract.
For the traditional training camp version of the show, the NFL has criteria for how they can force franchises to appear. If a team has a first-year head coach, a previous appearance on the show within the last 10 years, or if they have made the playoffs within the last two seasons, then they can’t be forced to be featured on Hard Knocks.
There have only been two times since the show’s inception that the Steelers could have been forced to appear. They missed the playoffs in two straight seasons leading up to 2014 and 2020.
They did the double feature of the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers in 2020, a few years after the city landed its second NFL franchise. I am not sure what led to them choosing the Falcons in 2014 over the Steelers, but that was their one good chance. The in-season version doesn’t follow the same set of rules, and this one will feature the entire division instead of just the Steelers. Still, I imagine Pittsburgh getting its fair share of screen time.
“This is huge. I mean, we got a lot of Steeler fans at our NFL Films office,” Riley said. “…But to come here and feature the Pittsburgh Steelers, a team that we’ve been trying to document for years, we are super excited to be here. You can tell when you’re here in this building that this isn’t a team that’s just trying to get wins. This is the team that’s trying to win championships. You feel the culture when you walk in these halls.”
This show is coming during the most difficult stretch of the Steelers’ schedule. There is also potential that it will run after back-to-back losses in the AFC North for the Steelers. Let’s hope they can pull out the win on Sunday over the Bengals, or it could be an ominous start to the all-access show for the Steelers.
