Evening Latte

Hard Knocks is one of my favorite shows of all time. There’s a longer post I may write someday, but the short version is: this show portrays more intriguing personal drama, everyday humor, and gut punches than a lot of fictional shows, and it’s real.

My favorite parts of the show are the humanizing moments. We’re used to viewing professional athletes as otherworldly beings set apart from the rest of us. They do things every game that 99.99% of us could never do, so of course we’re going to put them up on pedestals to some extent. So I personally find watching them joke around with each other, suck at bowling, put their kid to sleep, and other seemingly mundane things interesting. That’s the charm of the show. Examples:

It is a tradition in all NFL camps to have rookies get in front of the whole team and say their name, school, and signing bonus before doing some sort of performance. It’s about the lightest form of hazing you’ll find; it’s all done good-naturedly, and as long as you put in any form of effort, people will get into it. This is Aiden Hutchinson serenading his teammates during the 2022 training camp season (Detroit Lions).

I also find it fascinating to see into a world where the mundane is our ridiculous. This seems to happen most often during warmups or between practice segments. This clip from the first episode of this year’s in-season features Joe Burrow casually mentioning he purchased one of the ten official replica Batmobiles from the Dark Knight films. Nobody says anything about the $3,000,000 price tag. Instead, they riff about how he’s going to have to get a matching outfit and how to roll up to a club with it. It’s just three friends jawing at each other during a break.

All that to say: I think this year’s in-season is trying to do too much. Traditionally, each season covers one team, whether that’s training camp or the regular season. This gives time to show at least several facets of the story: we see practice, film rooms, home time, game days, and unique moments like the two I’ve linked. But this season is trying to cover four teams in 60 minutes a week. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and in the first episode, we spent almost all of it talking about the stakes of the actual football and very little of it taking glimpses into this fascinating world.

That Hutch clip is over 2.5 minutes, which is almost 1% of the 5-episode season. Almost 1% of that season was dedicated to one player singing to (and eventually with) his teammates. I absolutely love that. The best part of the clip is after he sings the wrong opening line. The whole room is (laughingly) booing him, but his quarterback in the front row (Jared Goff) repeatedly yells at him “You got it! You got it!” He becomes a $10M+ a year hype man. Hutch regroups, starts again, and about a minute later, the entire room erupts with him into the chorus of Billie Jean.

Listen, I know a lot of these guys make millions of dollars a year. I know (and am more than a little guilty) about the permanent damage people do to their bodies for this game. But there’s something pure in that clip. I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of a few teams in my life. Not people who play sports together; real teams. There’s nothing else in life like that kind of locker room. And for about two and a half minutes, those guys were just having a blast forgetting all the serious stuff and doing whole-team karaoke with their teammates. Show me more of that.