Has the NFL Reached a Tipping Point in the Race for All-Access Content?

More than a quarter of the league will be documented by NFL Films alone this season. Several GMs discuss the way those shows have changed in our new era of reality TV.

The Rams are one of nine teams that have granted access to NFL Films this season, in addition to their own in-house video operations. / Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports

NFL Films came to New York Jets GM Mike Tannenbaum in 2009 wanting to shine the Hard Knocks spotlight on his team and, at that point, the timing was not right. He had a rookie coach (Rex Ryan), a rookie quarterback (Mark Sanchez) and too many moving parts.

After that team made the AFC title game, HBO and NFL Films circled back.

Tannenbaum, raised in the business by Bill Belichick and Bill Parcells, still had serious reservations. Then, he talked to the original Hard Knocks GM: Ozzie Newsome, whose 2001 Baltimore Ravens were the guinea pigs for the first season of the famed summer show.

“He made a really interesting point that convinced me,” Tannenbaum says. “He’s like, When the cameras are on, the players compete more, because the eyes of the football world are on them. I never had thought of it that way.”

And the result?

The Jets wound up back in the conference championship round.

“After our experience, I completely agree with [Ozzie],” Tannenbaum continues. “It made practices a heck of a lot more competitive. That was a massive positive I didn’t expect. It allowed for people’s authentic personalities to come out. That team had a ton of characters on it. It was a much different experience, much more positive, than I would have expected.”

Those, of course, were simpler times.

Fourteen years ago, Hard Knocks was still a bit of a novelty. The Jets’ summer was Season 6 for the show. The Ravens and Dallas Cowboys went in back-to-back years in 2001 and ’02. Then, for four years, the series was shuttered. It returned with the Kansas City Chiefs in ’07 and has run every summer since, save for the lockout year of ’11.

Of late, a lot has changed. Teams have launched their own in-house reality series. The idea of featuring camp has spilled over into the season, into the draft, into other sports and just about everywhere.

Already this summer, NFL Films has produced The Pick Is In, billed as an all-access look at the draft from the war rooms of the Chicago Bears, Washington Commanders, Arizona Cardinals and Los Angeles Rams. It has an offseason offshoot of Hard Knocks on the New York Giants premiering next month. Then, the Bears (again) will take center stage for the traditional training camp Hard Knocks. After that, the in-season version of Hard Knocks will feature the four teams of the AFC North.

That brings the total to nine teams, more than a quarter of the league, raising the curtain for NFL Films alone.

It also begs a question: Are we approaching an all-access tipping point with all these clubs?

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It’s a summer MMQB, through which will try to give you something to sip on in the one news desert of the NFL offseason. In this week’s takeaways, you’ll hear …

• Trevor Lawrence on his new contract, and what it means (and doesn’t mean) to him.

• How Lawrence’s contract structure could impact the other quarterbacks looking for deals.

• Why the Denver Broncos brought ex-Stanford coach David Shaw into the fold.

• Where Rhamondre Stevenson fits for the Patriots.

And a whole lot more. But we’re starting with where the NFL’s been going, from an entertainment standpoint, for a long time.

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Full credit for this story idea goes to one of my esteemed editors, Mitch Goldich. He’d watched The Pick Is In and was taken aback a bit by the level of conversation he saw.

I genuinely can’t believe how many NFL GMs have accepted the fact that their trade discussions during the draft will be recorded and shared publicly. It’s amazing what our world now tolerates in the name of content.

— Mitch Goldich 🐙 (@mitchgoldich) June 15, 2024

After watching it, I’d agree.

The content, of course, was gold for the viewers. There was Commanders GM Adam Peters’s comment to Philadelphia Eagles GM Howie Roseman—“You’re a pain in the ass”—for driving a hard bargain, as Philly tried to move up to land Iowa DB Cooper DeJean. There were all the minute details of the Rams’ varied attempts to trade up. And, to me, the potential for collateral damage was notable.

Of course, neither Roseman nor the Eagles signed up for their negotiation to be public, nor did the Jets, Las Vegas Raiders or Indianapolis Colts know beforehand that the Rams’ offers they turned down would be aired. Then, there’s the player side. It’s one thing for DE Jared Verse, the Rams’ first-round pick, to know that his team was trying to move up for tight end Brock Bowers, who plays on the other side of the ball. It’s another to know they were also trying to get in position to take Texas 3-technique Byron Murphy, another pass rusher, after failing to land Bowers.

Now, there are professional courtesies and personal relationships that can cut through these complications. The Commanders, for example, took the aforementioned clip to the Eagles, and Roseman, to make sure they were comfortable with it before it aired.

But having to do that illustrates the difference now from where things were a decade ago, when NFL Films’s reality television focus was exclusively on the training camp show.

What teams are signing up for now is, quite simply, different.

“When you do Hard Knocks or All or Nothing, like we did, or you do the Behind the Grind series, which we do annually, when it’s just your team, it makes the narrative much tighter,” Rams COO Kevin Demoff says. “This is something that I’d think about with the [NFC North] division Hard Knocks. Your story gets shared with a lot of other stories. You don’t always have the singular storytelling you might like to have in a series like this.

“That’s not to say that it’s not the control or the editing that you’d want to have. But if NFL Films has another team—or whether it’s Netflix and Quarterback—when they’re trying to balance so many stories, a story you might like and are passionate about and want to be told and explored may not be a story that’s told and explored in a way you’d hoped it be.”

So you lose some of the positives of doing it. And, yes, gain some negatives in how such a series might affect your relationships with your players or other teams.

Then, in terms of the offseason shows, there’s the issue of timing.

With the camp Hard Knocks, or even the in-season version, an episode comes out every week, so there’s less of a need to timestamp anything. In the offseason, though, or during the draft, things can change quickly—so where a team stands on a player in February may not be the same as it is in April, or a negotiation that could be in a nasty place in March might be in a better spot come May.

That’s something the Giants, with their Hard Knocks treatment coming, are grappling with now. The NFL Films folks joined them at the Senior Bowl and stayed with them through the draft, which will open a window for viewers that hasn’t been cracked in that way before.

“The difference between this and in-season [show] is it comes out on Tuesday, and then there’s a game on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday during the preseason, or Sunday,” says Giants GM Joe Schoen, who was with a Hard Knocks team once before (the Miami Dolphins in 2012). “You don’t know how it’s gonna play out. This is unique, because some of the stuff has already played out. The season hasn’t played out, but the decision making has played out and the process has taken place. It’s gonna be unique from that standpoint.

“It’s the first time anybody’s done a show like this in the offseason with the access that they were granted.”

And that presents new challenges on where to draw the lines.

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Former Raiders GM Mike Mayock, truth be told, didn’t want to do Hard Knocks in 2019.

That was even though, having worked at NFL Network for over a decade and remotely through NFL Films’s South Jersey studios for much of that time, he had the utmost respect for the Films folks. It was just that, as a rookie GM with Jon Gruden as his coach, and a roster he’d flipped upside down, that had characters such as Antonio Brown coming onto it, he felt strongly that the timing wasn’t right.

“I knew their cameramen. I knew their producers. And I knew they were high-quality, trustable people,” Mayock says. “I’ve got a lot of respect for who they are and what they do. On the other hand, I was a rookie GM stepping into my first training camp with a highly visible cast of characters. … The Raiders were coming off a four-win season. We were going to turn the roster over drastically. I didn’t feel like it was the time or place for cameras embedded everywhere. I went heavy on the negative side.”

The first line he drew: no showing players getting cut.

That was a problem for NFL Films, with the stories of underdogs historically highlighted in the show, and built to a climax where they either make the team or they don’t. On that one, Mayock used his own experience as a player, a generation earlier, as his bellwether. And the decision he was faced with, and had to make, stuck with him enough that he thought about it recently when watching the Netflix series Full Swing, and seeing Keegan Bradley and his wife crushed at Bradley’s not making the Ryder Cup team on it.

“The payoff for the TV people is whether they get cut or not, that moment,” Mayock says. “I’ve been cut. I was cut several times, both as a Steeler and as a New York Giant. I felt like it was an intensely private moment that I wouldn’t want to give up to the public without my knowledge and consent as a player. I feel like both things get handled in a certain way. It’s emotional and it’s tough. That’s why it shows so well on television, but I don’t think it’s fair to anyone involved to put them in that position.

“I shut that down, and they weren’t happy about that.”

Whether that line should be crossed, of course, is something that’s been discussed since the show started airing 23 years ago.

As these sorts of shows have grown, and new ones have surfaced, new lines have needed to be drawn. But many of them have the same principle—having the sensitivity not to recklessly involve people who didn’t sign up for the show.

Along those lines, Schoen, for the offseason show, had two cameras in his office. They weren’t recording at all times. To Schoen’s understanding, there had to be someone in there operating them, so he knew when they were rolling. Still, he wasn’t always sure what could be heard, and what couldn’t be heard, so there’d be a natural inclination to be prepared at all times and also make sure his private conversations remained that way.

“The biggest thing is protecting the privacy and the trust of people that we’re going to have to continue to work with in the industry,” Schoen says. “Not just other GMs, but if you’re talking about college players and you’re talking about background, you have sources at a school and stuff you were told about a player that may be great. It may not be great. There’s HIPAA, there’s medical information, there’s medical meetings, all these areas that we do a lot of research on throughout the draft process.

“You also want to keep a competitive advantage if you think you’re doing certain things better than other teams. There’s a lot that goes into it that you got to be aware of.”

And therein lies another area Mayock wasn’t really comfortable showing.

“There are a lot of things that cross over,” he says. “Putting any other team’s business out there, to me, would be a big no. Showing people publicly how we work internally would be a big no. How we evaluate, what certain people’s specific duties are in the building, any background or character of players or coaches or scouts. To me, all those things go past the personal privacy level of an individual and also what we have to safeguard as a team.”

So what does that leave NFL Films and teams to work with?

There are still positives.

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The heightened attention raising the intensity of practices wasn’t the only plus Tannenbaum gleaned from his Hard Knocks experience.

There’s one he sees as still being felt by some of those Jets today.

“I would say, for us, we had a really good year,” Tannenbaum says. “I do think the lens [is different], if some team does it and the season doesn’t go well. There’s a little bit of, Oh, is that the reason why? I think for us, we had a special year, came up a little short in the championship game. You look at the people that have gone on with it, from Bart Scott, Mark Sanchez, Rex, just an unbelievable group of personalities.”

Those three personalities—long after leaving the Jets, and even the arena of the NFL’s team environment—are still on national television.

So there’s that individual benefit. From a team standpoint, there’s certainly a business component to the exposure that doesn’t hurt, in addition to the fact that you’re serving the greater interest of the sport and the league's viability as a year-round entertainment entity.

“The more storytelling around your brand and your football team you can do, the better,” Demoff says. “These are great opportunities to showcase the people in your organization, your players, your coaches, your staff, and to bring fans into places that traditional media outlets don’t give them a glimpse into. We’re always trying to find ways to elevate the Rams’ brand in storytelling. And any chance we can get to bring people into the world of Sean [McVay] is a good thing.”

Accordingly, for all the issues these guys have, there is plenty they’re fine with.

Mayock brought up the example of Gruden being Gruden, or rookies singing their college fight songs, or larger broad-strokes discussions in meeting rooms as O.K. “Stuff that I believe gives people a snapshot of what goes on in training camp and behind closed doors, but doesn’t reveal anything about the way we operate the team,” he explains.

Everyone understands the larger mission, that these sorts of things help to fuel the popularity of the sport, which is why so many players and coaches are pulling down seven- and eight-figure salaries.

There’s also the history of it, that the NFL is a league that, under legendary commissioner Pete Rozelle, used the relentless marketing of its game to elevate the sport’s popularity to the point where, now, decades later, it’s an unquestioned No. 1 in the U.S. NFL Films was a massive part of that, and it happened by pushing boundaries in what could be done from a sports perspective through the media.

“The NFL is in the business of entertaining, via the game of football,” Rams GM Les Snead says, via text. “The NFL and our media partners are in the content business. And the content that makes up our particular show is the ecosystem that contains the game and all the interesting theory and nuance that goes into getting ready for Sundays during the fall. I think because of the overall popularity of our show, the structure of our season with less games and a lot more buildup, we have discovered that a lot of that buildup is interesting.

“Here we are, and it’ll be up to all of us within the game theory portion of the ecosystem to try to figure out what parts of the drama, of the buildup, are worth letting out of the bottle, so to speak. I do think it is very important to work together with the final editing so that we distribute newer, more novel content while not engineering unnecessary distractions.”

As the scope of all this grows, that last part, on working together, has become more important than ever before.

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One thing that those who’ve gone through the experience seem to agree on is how professional the NFL Films people on the ground are. The camera ops, sound guys and producers have a way of blending in with their surroundings that, in most cases, allows for players, coaches and staff to go about their business in a normal way.

“You almost forget, they do such a good job,” Tannenbaum says. “I remember one time I had agreed to meet with Darrelle Revis’s agent in-person. During the day, one of the producers came up to me and said, Do you mind if I come to that meeting? … How do you know about that? … We record all your calls. … Oh my God, I forgot. They have unfettered access.”

But the truth is, the trust now isn’t what it once was, or even was for Tannenbaum’s experience. There are a couple of reasons why.

First, there’s a push fueled by owners and the highest levels of the league office to create more and more content that can be sold for profit, and that’s pushed teams and players and coaches and everyone thrust on camera closer and closer to the lines of appropriate access in just about every way. Second, the relationship between the NFL Films office in Jersey, where these shows are produced, and teams isn’t what it once was.

It’s not anyone’s fault, but without a certain legend in charge, it really can’t be.

“When Steve Sabol was alive, every owner in the league, every executive in the league, knew that Steve Sabol had their back,” Mayock says. “Nothing would see the light of day that the team didn’t want. Steve himself would pull stuff out. Steve understood entertainment, but he also would never throw a team or a player or a coach under the truck, ever. Because of that, it bought NFL Films an awful lot of latitude.

“Now we’re getting to the point where almost everybody out there has got some kind of access, with some kind of show, with people you don’t really know. There are people with phones filming everything. There’s so much stuff out there that, in my opinion, yeah, we’re probably well past the tipping point. The old school, 30 years ago, Hey we’re O.K. because it’s Steve Sabol, that’s long gone.”

It is, indeed, a new day in the NFL, when it comes to this stuff.

A more complicated one, for sure.

A better one? That really depends on who you’re talking to.