I’m sure Jets fans are just thrilled by this news. Despite vehemently not wanting to be on Hard Knock, the New York Jets have been essentially selected by the NFL against their will to appear on the HBO program.
I feel like Hard Knocks is turning into the NFL’s version of the dentist.
The New York Jets have been selected by the NFL to appear on Hard Knocks for the 19th season of the show, and the Jets fans, players, staff, and executives are about as dour and unhappy with the news as one might expect. And, to be honest, I perfectly understand why.
When you’re already a cursed, desolate organization, there may not be any harm in adding one more curse onto the stack list of them from the outside eye. Yet, from an inside perspective, one more curse is just a huge slap in the face when you’re already red from a 100 other slaps.
And that’s exactly how the Jets feel right now as the NFL randomly (well, not really randomly, but rather arbitrarily) chose the New York Jets, a team with absolutely nothing but catastrophic collapses and hilarious failures in its history, to be on Hard Knocks, the HBO show that has cursed the last 14 participants, for the 2023 offseason.
Truthfully, if I was a Jets fan, I’d be super annoyed about this news as it not only adds a ton of more pressure onto the Jets actually doing something meaningful this season, but it also makes the team building process ten times more difficult than it normally would have been.
As everyone who has seen the show knows, the HBO cameras are more intrusive than your doctor at a colonoscopy as they film every single practice session, team building moment, film study meeting, player hang outs, coaching discussions, player livelihoods outside of the facility, and all roster cuts and decision made during the offseason weeks prior to the final preseason game.
It’s great fun for the NFL and the fans as they can see their favorite teams up close and the NFL can market the game even more, but it must absolutely suck for the players and coaching staff involved as they’re essentially broadcasting their playbooks and preparation processes to the 31 other teams for free.
And, seeing as how only 8 of the last 14 teams to participate in the show have gone on to win 9+ games and only one teams (2021 Dallas Cowboys) have won a playoff game, the likelihood that the Jets meet a similar, sad fate as those teams is quite high. Actually, it’s extremely high as this is a young, developing team…and it’s the Jets.
Of all the teams with something to prove this season in a short amount of time, it’s the New York Jets as they traded a fortune for the 38-year-old Aaron Rodgers and stacked their roster young, inexperienced, and unproven stars.
The Jets need to win a Super Bowl either this year or the next as the rising cap costs for these young stars, who mostly are on rookie and/or team friendly deals at the moment, and Aaron Rodgers’ age will close this once-in-a-generation Super Bowl window even faster than it opened.
This has the writing of a great, triumphant story of success where the New York Jets, led by an NFL legend in Aaron Rodgers and a core of young stars, win their first Super Bowl in 50+ years, or a tragic tale of a woefully managed team once again failing its lofty expectations by acquiring has-beens and inexperienced youngsters who couldn’t handle the pressure.
And it’ll all be captured by the Hard Knocks cameras.
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