HBO’s Hard Knocks to blame for Steelers rough second half schedule
You won’t hear Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin make excuses, but deep somewhere in the recesses of his mind, within the privacy of his one space, he knows that NFL schedule makers set his team up big time this season.
When the 2024 regular season slate was released, everyone with an opinion (including us) detailed the Steelers’ second portion of their schedule, including all their division matchups. It’s the latest that Pittsburgh, or any team, has played their first in-division game. That game would be played in Week 11, against the Baltimore Ravens, which led into a difficult short week road trip played in the snow at Cleveland.
It should be no surprise that Cleveland is where HBO’s cameras started rolling, as the league previously announced the first-ever in-season edition of the network’s award-winning Hard Knocks series. For those unfamiliar, the documentary series is produced by NFL Films and HBO, initially following teams through their offseason training camp. This year, the show expanded to cover the New York Giants during their offseason and for the first time ever, covers an entire division during the season.
For HBO, the decision on which division to feature was easy. Aside from the AFC North producing four teams with winning records in 2023, a first for the league since 1930, three of those teams made the postseason. The highly competitive AFC North, however, featured something else HBO has sought since the inception of its show in 2001: the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The Steelers have been a unicorn, white whale, and holy grail all wrapped up in one for the network, as Pittsburgh often dodged the offseason criteria to required to feature a team on Hard Knocks. With the Steelers in playoff contention often, and having not had a season below .500 since 2003, HBO had been unable to tap them for their other shows. In the few seasons where the Steelers could have been featured, another team volunteered or was selected to be on the program.
Now, with the first in-season division coverage for the series, HBO gets its wish of snagging Steelers Nation TV ratings. Among the most-watched teams whenever they play, it’s obvious that Pittsburgh would be a natural moneymaker for any media outlet. That money trail also suspiciously leads us back to the 2024 schedule release and why the Steelers’ calendar is stacked heading into the home stretch before the playoffs.
According to HBO’s official website:
For the first time, television’s most acclaimed sports documentary franchise chronicles an entire NFL division with Hard Knocks: In Season with the AFC North. The 18-time Emmy®-winning series delivers all-access coverage of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, and Cleveland Browns as they battle for the AFC North crown during the final six weeks of the 2024-25 NFL season, plus the playoff run for the division winner and any AFC North Wild Card teams.
The keyword in the above description is the final six weeks of the season, which shows the NFL’s business prowess at best in setting up compelling narratives while also ignoring the impact of having all of these games lumped into the final portion of the year. While all six of the Steelers AFC North games are played from Week 11 on, the Hard Knocks series conveniently picks up right after the Cleveland Browns Thursday Night Football game, giving us a quick review before moving forward to the first episode’s coverage of the Steelers playing the Bengals in Cincinnati.
As the series continues, episode two (which aired Tuesday evening) chronicles the rematch between the Browns and Steelers. But the AFC North isn’t the only carrot being dangled by the NFL’s moneymaking business practices, as two other high profile teams will dot the landscape over the course of the six episodes. It’s almost a masterclass, if you will, in how the league created the schedule, wrangling two Netflix exclusive games for Christmas Day into the mix and double-dipping with Hard Knocks cameras being on the sideline.
That stretch of the campaign sees the Steelers play three games in eleven days and all against top flight opponents. The first of those teams is the 11-1 Philadelphia Eagles, with the Christmas Day game featuring the 12-1 Kansas City Chiefs, complete with Taylor Swift, coming to Acrisure Stadium.
Wednesday matchups are a rarity in the NFL, unless you’re the Steelers or Ravens, who played each other on a Wednesday afternoon during the pandemic. Similarly, the Ravens see their schedule impacted in the same manner by the league. The Ravens will also play on Christmas Day, against the Houston Texans. To best prepare both the Ravens and Steelers for the short weeks, the NFL has them playing on a Saturday.
The difference is, the Ravens just completed a Week 14 bye, and get to play the 2-11 New York Giants before hosting the Steelers for that Saturday slate.
For the Steelers, their bye week has long since passed. With a two-game lead in the division, HBO gets their wish granted of seeing how Mike Tomlin prepares his squad for the tough challenges ahead. Those challenges have started to take their toll with injuries too, with WR George Pickens and DL Larry Ogunjobi among the starters already questionable to play in the big matchup against Philadelphia.
With short turnaround between the Eagles, Ravens, and Chiefs games, the Steelers could find themselves without enough time for their star players to heal, while other teams around the league get the comfort of playing a regular Sunday-to-Sunday slate, in most cases.
For this tough stretch of the season, fans can thank the NFL for pandering to HBO, all for the sake of getting Steelers Nation to bump their numbers. While it’s great to finally get an inside look as to how Mike Tomlin operates, and also see how the rest of the division rivals respond, the TV money certainly set the Steelers up for failure. However, you won’t hear Coach T say that, and being no strangers to adversity, it already appears that Hard Knocks – and the league – is getting a Pittsburgh team they weren’t counting on having at the beginning of the season.
