There was a time when John Mara, owner and CEO of the Giants, jokingly (we think) said he would be dead before the Giants would agree to let HBO feature their team in its popular and polarizing series “Hard Knocks.”
Based on his aversion to transparency when it comes to the inner workings of his team, Giants head coach Brian Daboll likely welcomed the idea of “Hard Knocks” and the HBO cameras the same way Bill Belichick might welcome paparazzi aboard his “VIII Rings” boat to follow him and his 23-year-old cheerleader, Jordon Hudson, around for a day.
You get the idea.
And yet, here we are.
On Tuesday night at 9 p.m., “Hard Knocks: Offseason with the New York Giants” airs the first of its five-part series.
Distractions, anyone?
Daboll does his best to avoid distractions the same way people try to avoid COVID-19. HBO’s presence in these episodes of “Hard Knocks,” while entertaining, can also be intrusive. Daboll would rather have a bad case of poison ivy for a month than allow distractions to seep into the sacred sanctum of his meeting rooms and locker room.
Maybe the Giants can learn a little from the Jets, who are two-time veterans of the dangers that come with “hard hits.” The Jets’ most recent season was last season, which turned into months of controversy and heartbreak after Aaron Rodgers ruptured his Achilles tendon and the Jets’ season imploded.
The following words from star cornerback Sauce Gardner echoed when it was all over:
“I feel like we lost sight of some things that happened in the offseason with Aaron, with ‘Hard Knocks,’” Gardner said at the end of the 2023 season. “When there are a lot of cameras and a lot of things going on, you can lose sight of what major”.
The Jets’ first attempt at HBO’s “Hard Knocks” came in 2010, with Rex Ryan as head coach and Darrelle Revis under center for the team.
Who can forget when an HBO producer asked cornerback Antonio Cromartie, known for having eight children with numerous different women, to name all of his children and it took him about 40 seconds to name them all?
Or Ryan barking at his team after a bad practice at Hofstra University: “Let’s go eat a damn sandwich.” Or the contentious contract negotiations between Revis and general manager Mike Tannenbaum?
“The 2010 Jets changed the profile and success of ‘Hard Knocks’ forever,” NFL Films executive producer Patrick Kelleher said last year.
Don’t expect that kind of juicy TV drama to come out of the Giants’ involvement with the show. In some ways, this is a soft landing for “Hard Knocks” because all five of its episodes were filmed during the offseason. So there was no nonsense associated with locker room drama or game outcomes.
Still, the Giants haven’t been without drama this offseason, starting with Daboll firing defensive coordinator Wink Martindale and the Giants scouting top college quarterbacks so aggressively that it had to make injury-prone starter Daniel Jones wonder what his future holds.
The flat-line Jones, of course, isn’t prone to delivering headline-generating material to the HBO cameras like Rodgers did with the Jets.
There’s also the Saquon Barkley problem, with Barkley demanding a long-term deal for safety and the Giants not wanting any part of that commitment. Barkley, one of the most popular Giants on the team’s most recent iteration, signed with the bitter rival Eagles. HBO viewers will surely be curious to see if there’s anything behind the scenes that could come out of that divorce.
It should be noted that the Giants had the final editorial say on this project, so don’t expect many explosive moments. What you’re sure to get is an inside look at some (albeit non-revealing) conversations between Daboll and general manager Joe Schoen around the draft and offseason moves.
Whether the show addresses the rift between Daboll and Martindale or the free-agency decisions to let Barkley and popular safety Xavier McKinney go or how extensive its homework was with top quarterbacks before the draft remains to be seen.
What you’re sure to see is some behind-the-scenes stuff about the team’s trade for defensive star Brian Burns and its selection of receiver Malik Nabers.
Rest assured, the Giants will not allow any of the entertaining calamities that arose from the Jets’ two “Hard Knocks” streaks to leak out for public consumption. Because, as Willow Gardner so perfectly put it at the end of the Jets’ season when assessing the effect of “hard knocks”: “At the end of the day, we still have to win.”
The same goes for the Giants, who, unlike the Jets, can’t let their players “lose the main thing.”
