If you’re thirsty for sprinkler heads popping up onto freshly cut fields, tight shots of slow motion spirals, and workout montages cut to Top 40 singles – fear not. A new season of Hard Knocks is just about 2 months away.
This year, the popular HBO series will focus on the Raiders and their final season in Oakland before heading to Las Vegas. Despite what you might believe, head coaches and front offices don’t exactly leap at the opportunity to be featured on the annual docu-series. It’s a distraction having camera crews at ever practice, every meeting, and following players, coaches and executives home to get a glimpse of their personal lives. With that said, the program is immensely popular every summer, so the show must go on.
As a compromise, the NFL and HBO have agreed to only select teams who A) do not have a first year head coach B) have not made the playoffs the last 2 years and C) have not been on Hard Knocks in the past 10 years. Outside of the Raiders, the teams that qualified this year were the Lions, 49ers, Redskins and Giants.
Always a polarizing franchise, the Raiders made plenty of moves in free agency that will give HBO producers plenty of material to choose from over the course of the 5 episode season. The largest offseason splash the Silver and Black made this year was trading for Steelers WR Antonio Brown. As if bringing on that one man content creator wasn’t enough, they also signed huge personalities like LB Vontaze Burfict (known to most as the NFL’s dirtiest player) and OG Richie Ingocnito (the catalyst behind “BullyGate”) to the roster.
Even if the Raiders had a vanilla roster when it came to characters, their head coach might have enough charisma himself to carry the season. 8 year Monday Night Football veteran Jon Gruden is entering season 2 of his second stint with the Raiders, and has a lot of winning to do to justify his 10 year $100,000,000 deal. The fun is set to begin August 6th on HBO.