‘Hard Knocks’ Would Be Nuts Not to Choose the Pittsburgh Steelers

BY ADAM GREENE

This opportunity has presented itself before. The rules for being “selected” to be featured on HBO’s Hard Knocks are simple; a team can’t have a first-year head coach, they had to miss the playoffs for the previous two seasons and they can’t have appeared on Hard Knocks in the last 10 years.

I call that last clause the “Bengals Amendment” as it keeps Mike Brown from volunteering his garbage team to appear on the show every season. In reality, all the HK rules were put into place after the second Bengals season no one on the planet wanted to see.

If those rules had been in place in 2013, then the Pittsburgh Steelers could have been compelled to be on a show that in which no good team every wants to be featured. Hard Knocks is a badge of dishonor in the NFL. It’s a sign of organizational and coaching failure, of bad drafts, poor free agent spending and stupid team management. If you’re available for Hard Knocks, you’re not a good football franchise.

It’s why so many NFL head coaches featured on Hard Knocks since it returned in 2007 are no longer NFL head coaches. In fact, only the Houston Texans’ Bill O’Brien from the 2015 season and last year’s Jon Gruden of the Oakland Raiders still have their jobs. Everybody else is either an assistant, out of the league, or riding a desk as a TV analyst. In fact, three of the last four teams that were featured on the show fired their head coach during or after that same season.

It’s a murderer’s row of bad football.

That’s why when the opportunity arises, through injuries, bad luck and playoff tiebreakers to feature an actual good team on the show, it should be pounced upon immediately. It’s why Hard Knocks can not mess up its chance to put the Pittsburgh Steelers on the show this season. It may not ever come again.

The Steelers have been a consistent playoff team since 1989, rarely taking more than few years off before making their return. Mike Tomlin is just the third head coach the team has hired since 1969. The two guys that proceeded him, Chuck Noll and Bill Cowher, are both in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Tomlin, for whatever faults he has (and there are few) is probably headed there too.

With the new playoff rules proposed in the 2020 NFL/NFLPA Collective Bargaining Agreement, Pittsburgh might never miss the playoffs again. Under the new regs, they would have been in this year and in 2018 too. This opportunity is basically the Haley’s Comet of Hard Knocks seasons. It’ll only come around once every 75 years or so.

Of course, Hard Knocks has blown one of these chances before.

Not with the Steelers, but with the New Orleans Saints. And they did it twice. The Saints missed the playoffs in 2015 and 2016, the second and third years they did so. They were right on the cusp, going 7-9 three straight years and had a future Hall of Fame quarterback in Drew Brees and head coach in Sean Payton on the roster. There was even the added drama of it not being too far away from Payton’s Bountygate season-long suspension.

If Hard Knocks had picked the Saints, they would have no choice but to comply. Instead, they picked the Texans in 2015 and the Los Angeles Rams in 2016. The Rams season was especially egregious as Hard Knocks didn’t even bother to focus on the team’s star players like Aaron Donald, Todd Gurley and only barely tossed a glance at rookie QB Jared Goff. Instead, there wasn’t a practice squad or first-cut loser they didn’t point a camera at. In a season of low points for the Rams, it was one of the lowest.

The teams up this year? The Detroit Lions, Jacksonville Jaguars, Arizona Cardinals, Denver Broncos and, of course, the Steelers. I guarantee you that if you’d like to see any of those other teams on a Hard Knocks in the future, you’ll get your chance. Hell, in the NFC West the Cardinals could .500 or better for the next decade and not make the postseason.

The Steelers? This is it. Don’t be stupid again, NFL Films.

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