This originally appeared in Wednesday morning’s edition of The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter with the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis. Sign up here and be the first to know everything going on in the sports media world.
It wasn’t an announcement met with much fanfare, but the PGA Tour’s partnership with NFL Films to create a Hard Knocks-style series surrounding The Players Championship is a fascinating news story.
Once upon a time, Hard Knocks was at the cutting edge of sports documentaries. Their behind-the-scenes access at NFL training camps was one of the most talked-about sports stories every summer. The HBO series offered unique access that was never before seen and featured so many incredible and intimate moments that it felt like we shouldn’t even be allowed to see it in the first place.
And ultimately, the NFL and the powers-that-be throughout the league agreed with that assessment.
As teams became less and less comfortable with HBO cameras all up in their business, the original training camp series has almost become unrecognizable from the tour de force that it was when it began. The most recent edition featuring the Buffalo Bills was so sanitized and watered down that it could have been produced by the team itself.
Unfortunately, the same thing happened when the series first tackled the offseason with the New York Giants. Again, Hard Knocks was leading the way. It was candid. It was revealing. And it was too much for the NFL world. When the Giants’ decision-making process around letting Saquon Barkley sign with the rival Philadelphia Eagles and lead them to the Super Bowl became a meme, it was the last time we would ever see anything compelling like that happen again from the NFL.
Because of the success of Hard Knocks and Drive to Survive, every sport has gotten in on the fly-on-the-wall docuseries. Even the PGA Tour has Full Swing, a DTS-inspired series for Netflix. But the proliferation of these series has come at a time when sports documentaries are now a dime a dozen. And instead of offering real, honest, raw insights, we are seeing these vehicles become little more than expensive public relations tools for the athletes or teams in question. The space is littered with vapid vanity projects that only seem to satisfy egos and narratives and not much else.
But maybe that’s where the PGA Tour can come in to give the concept a second life.
An inconvenient truth in all of this is that the NFL doesn’t need Hard Knocks anymore. The league will still be watched by tens of millions of fans and will still generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue without it. But the PGA Tour does need Hard Knocks. Every sport not named the NFL is facing a major inflection point, with leagues preparing for impact as football takes yet more money out of the media rights market, perhaps as early as this year. Everyone else, including professional golf, will fight for the leftovers.
It’s incumbent on sports leagues to be more innovative in reaching new fans now more than ever. Younger generations are turning away from sports; paywalls and streaming platforms are making it more cumbersome to follow; and the attention spans of the masses are much harder to break through.
It’s no coincidence that this news arises right as new PGA Tour commissioner Brian Rolapp addresses the media at the tour’s flagship event at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach for the first time. Rolapp is an NFL Media alum. And he knows that the tour is at a crossroads when it comes to fan engagement and finding new ways to reach new demographics.
Rolapp has already emphasized the need for the PGA Tour to improve on its storytelling capabilities and provide better access for fans. So what better way to do that than by returning to a proven formula that he knows works from his NFL days? But hopefully, he takes the lessons that will tell him what to do to attract fans and provide insight and entertainment from the OG days of Hard Knocks instead of what not to do from its recent installments.
Hard Knocks may have outlived its usefulness to the NFL, but maybe its impact in the wider sports world is just beginning.