Ken Rodgers on ‘Hard Knocks: In Season with the AFC North,’ the ‘hardest production’ in NFL Films history

Rodgers said the Hard Knocks team does have some advantages in making those connections there over newer documentary projects, particularly given their history and the relationships they’ve built over the years.

“I’m not sure that you could start up a Hard Knocks-type follow program today and have it be as quick turnaround and robust as Hard Knocks, because building it from scratch now would be so very difficult and expensive,” Rodgers said. “We’ve luckily evolved from being the first sports follow doc show in 2001. And it’s been step by step where we’ve added to the infrastructure. If you try to build the Hard Knocks infrastructure now, I don’t think it’s economically viable to build from scratch to be as robust as we have it.”

On the division-wide approach, he said it’s showing its value already and will only increase that over time.

“I think it will work better and better as we go because the stakes will become clearer and clearer. I think I sort of saw these first three weeks as testing the waters and introducing the audience to the broad swath of what the setting is. The setting is the AFC North, and it has all these characters, and these four teams, really starting this week with rivalry week. You’re playing for the Battle of Ohio and for the division. I think it’s going to start separating where we’re going to have clear stakes of who is fighting for what.”

“So the team or teams that aren’t in the playoffs, we’ll start concentrating more on the personalities, because everyone has their own stakes. They’re trying to keep a job, put stuff on tape, prove themselves, get a new contract, whatever it might be. The stakes are still high, but they’re on a personal level. Whereas the teams that are in the playoffs, oh my gosh, I think it’s going to be even more dramatic than we’ve ever had in Hard Knocks.”

Rodgers said Hard Knocks: In Season is fantastic in terms of the stakes for the teams involved, and focusing on a division guarantees at least one team is playoff-bound.

“Off-season, training camp, they don’t compare to in-season in terms of stakes. And having a division that you know one of the teams on the show is going to win, it’s not a question of, ‘Wow, we hope we pick a team that wins.’ We have a team that’s going to win, and very likely another team that’s going to be in the playoffs, and maybe three teams that are gonna be in the playoffs. It’s going to be much better as the show goes on. And I think it’s already been really great.”

With the AFC North, three of the four teams made the playoffs last season, with the Cincinnati Bengals the odd one out but still producing a 9-8 record. This season looks like just the Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens (both 10-5 after Baltimore’s win over Pittsburgh Saturday) will make the postseason, and while the 7-8 Bengals are still in contention, the 3-12 Cleveland Browns (11-6 last year) are decidedly not. Rodgers said teams’ downturns are to be expected, though.

“It’s part of the business to me. You can have the best-laid plans, and then you probably get about a third of them coming true. A third of them just fail, and a third, there’s a whole new storyline or thing that happened that you never could have imagined going into this season.

He said the AFC North’s 2023 success was part of why it was chosen, but that didn’t necessarily translate to expecting it to be just as good this year.

“We picked the division that had the best playoff success last year in terms of making it into the playoffs, I think a lot of people said ‘That’s a slam dunk. Let’s start with that division.’ We were certainly interested in it because of that. But we didn’t expect, ‘Oh well, this is definitely going to be the division that’s the best division again.’ Now it might end up, they might end up having three teams in the playoffs, and we’ll be saying, ‘Wow, that really was good.’

“But we couldn’t have predicted how any of the teams would perform. You just look at where they were in the beginning of the season, and everybody has changed, whether it’s at quarterback in Pittsburgh or at quarterback in Cleveland, so much has changed, the injuries across the board. The unpredictability is something that’s built into the show and you have to embrace it, because if you try to stick with what you thought was gonna happen, you’ll be wrong, and you’ll be following the stories that people aren’t interested in.”

.@joeyb finds out that O-Line is not as fun as playing QB 🤣

New #HardKnocks with the AFC North tonight 9pm ET on @StreamOnMax pic.twitter.com/XaDKiqGoaf

— NFL Films (@NFLFilms) December 17, 2024

As for what’s ahead for Hard Knocks: In Season, Rodgers said it will keep going as long as at least one team is alive in the postseason. And he said the divisional focus is helpful for them in keeping it running longer.

“Hard Knocks will continue as long as one of the teams are in the playoffs. So in a dream scenario, we’re watching two AFC North teams play in the AFC Championship in an episode, which would be one heck of an episode. And Hard Knocks would be at the Super Bowl with one of these teams if they go to the Super Bowl.

“We’re in it for the long haul. It’s football, it’s the NFL, you never know, but whether or not it’s this year, under this model, going to divisions, one of these years, Hard Knocks will be at the Super Bowl. There’s no doubt about it. Sooner or later, it’s going to work out where that happens.”

Rodgers said the idea of the various Hard Knocks franchises overall is to set up a universe, and one worth viewing long after the shows initially air.

“We’re really in the midst of developing a universe. We’re not full enough of ourselves to ever say it’s like the Marvel universe or the Star Wars universe, but you can sort of imagine the tile on HBO being ‘Hey, this is a whole universe.’ And when you go in that tile, you can see all of these different storylines from different eras of the show. It’s been on for so long now, we’re coming up on 25 years. I love going back and watching the old ones even, because it just is this universe.”

He said that will also come with increased changes between the different shows.

“I think we’re in the midst of really differentiating between different parts of the franchise, if you will. The offseason being launched for the first time this year, the in-season changing to a different format was a real cognizant effort to elevate the great parts of the different series.

“Training camp is very, very clear in what it is. It’s a competition series of men trying to beat each other out for a spot on the roster. And the stakes are very clear, and it has an ending. Offseason’s more of a big-picture workplace environment, and so, we’re just figuring out how to tell that story, and evolving how to tell that story best about a workplace building a culture. There’s one practice in that, I mean, there’s combine and all that, but there was one practice.

“So it’s very much different from training camp. And then the in-season is more pure football, the stakes of trying to win a Super Bowl. So you look at the stakes and the situations of those three, we’re in the midst of really trying to differentiate them creatively, differentiate them from the way we tell the stories, how we tell the stories. And I think it’ll be much clearer as the years go by, cause we’re right in the beginning of figuring out how to do that.

Rodgers said there might be more Hard Knocks versions down the road, too.

“Does that lead to future versions of Hard Knocks? It sure might. I’m consistently amazed at the interest in Hard Knocks, having been here from the beginning on it. It never gets old, because the NFL turns over so much that when one player goes or one team goes down, there’s another team that you’re interested in. It really is a universe, a story universe.

“And I think we’re going to, if not continue to expand, continue to evolve, and really keep the show fresh and moving in a direction where you’ve got to see what happens next, and I think these coming next weeks in the AFC North are the best example of that. I can’t wait to see what happens, starting this week when they play each other. I mean, it’s Ravens-Steelers week, and we’re going to show it with the wires and everything on Hard Knocks. If you don’t get excited about that, you don’t love football.”

He said the current state of Hard Knocks represents quite a shift from early NFL Films history, especially when it comes to showing off players as more than just their on-field accomplishments.

“It’s amazing to see how the NFL Films of the 70s and 80s that built up the iconic mythological players of that age has adapted and changed to where now we’re taking the mythology and breaking it down and showing you the true story of just the individuals behind it. We used to turn men into heroes, and now we’re taking these heroes and bringing you behind the scenes to show them at Christmas, opening up presents with their families.

“And it’s a real great evolution to see in the history of sports media. It used to be celebrating people as above us and heroic. And it’s turned into, at least with these programs, with Hard Knocks, Receiver, Quarterback, showing you the men inside the jerseys. And to me, that’s been a really interesting change in the history of NFL Films and one that I think we’re embracing and continuing to evolve in.”