Why John Mara, Giants finally agreed to appear on ‘Hard Knocks’

For the first time in franchise history, the New York Giants will be featured on HBO’s “Hard Knocks.”

Starting at 9 p.m. Tuesday, fans will get behind-the-scenes access to the Giants, with the five-episode series premiere of the newest iteration of the HBO/NFL Films show, “Hard Knocks: Offseason with the New York Giants.”

To any longtime Giants fan, that news might still come as a shock. Team president and co-owner John Mara’s, let’s call it, distaste for the program is well-known. He infamously told the New York Daily News in 2010 that the Giants would appear on the show “when I’m next to my father in the Gates of Heaven Cemetery.”

So, why the change of heart?

The answer to that question has roots dating back two years when the Giants started to organize the celebration of the team’s centennial season in 2024. The new series spun from one of the primary goals of that planning process: How could the Giants tell the franchise’s 100-year story on a national scale?

“How do we identify and target that 17-year-old kid who lives out in California who may never go to any of our YouTube channels or our social media accounts?” said Nilay Shah, the Giants’ senior vice president for marketing and brand strategy. “How do we get them to understand the history and the impact this organization has had in the NFL in the context of our 100th season?”

To answer those questions, the Giants reached out to NFL Films and began brainstorming. Many ideas emerged from those sessions, including a Wellington Mara documentary set to air in the fall, but among the biggest was a notion that one project needed to focus on scouting and team-building. There was a strong connection to the concept of scouting because of Wellington Mara’s history as a scout. Additionally, current GM Joe Schoen and coach Brian Daboll had been open to access to in-house media.

Shah approached president and co-owner John Mara in November about the idea of a documentary on a national scale produced in partnership with NFL Films, and on Jan. 10, 2024, NFL Films met with Giants brass, including Mara and Schoen, to present the concept.

A lot of the discussion centered on the time and access NFL Films would need from the Giants and their team personnel, but the pitch ultimately came down to two key elements. One of those was thinking about where NFL Films had had access before and how this presented a completely new opportunity to show the front office side of the NFL during this specific part of the league calendar.

“And then some of it was just really following the natural narrative of what the problem solving of building a football team is,” said Paul Camarata, a “Hard Knocks: Offseason with the New York Giants” showrunner for NFL Films. “Unless you hold the trophy at the end of the year, and even when you do, there are question marks that next morning when you wake up. So it’s just sort of understanding what were the Giants’ question marks that the world knew or those the world didn’t know but they were trying to figure out.”

Two weeks later, the Giants agreed to take part in the project, though it had yet to fall officially under the “Hard Knocks” umbrella.

Three months after their initial meeting with NFL Films, the Giants agreed to be featured on this newest iteration of “Hard Knocks.” For the Giants, combining the 100th season with the team’s offseason program and the franchise’s scouting history dating to Wellington Mara’s contributions ended up being a perfect match.

“When I said to him, ‘Hey, John, this is something that I think, you know, if we’re gonna do this, the value of the (“Hard Knocks”) name and all the great production, and obviously HBO’s brand, now’s the time to do it,’” Shah said. “And he said yes to me on the spot. There wasn’t a lot of deliberation.”

What we’ll see

Since the show’s announcement in May, fans have been wondering how much will be shown from “Black Monday,” the tumultuous day following the conclusion of the 2023 season. After a disastrous 6-11 season, the Giants used Jan. 8 to reset their coaching staff, firing special teams coordinator Thomas McGaughey and offensive line coach Bobby Johnson. The day also involved a heated disagreement between Daboll and then-defensive coordinator Wink Martindale over the team’s decision to fire outside linebackers coach Drew Wilkins and his brother, defensive assistant Kevin Wilkins. Martindale and the Giants parted ways later that week.

While Tuesday night’s show will begin with Daboll’s postgame locker room speech after the 2023 season finale (a 27-10 win over the Philadelphia Eagles), the footage from that game is courtesy of the Giants’ in-house film crew. NFL Films didn’t begin shooting until February, so there isn’t going to be any NFL Films footage from Jan. 8. Any coverage of that transformative day will have to come from the Giants’ in-house team, which collaborated with NFL Films/HBO for this series.

NFL Films installed six to eight robo cameras in the Giants facility and had them running from February through the end of May/early June, including in Schoen’s office and in the draft war room. NFL Films crews filmed the Giants five to six days a week on average. An NFL Films crew also followed the Giants on the road to big events, including the scouting combine in Indianapolis.

Although the Giants’ in-house crew often films the team, this documentary still took some getting used to for Giants brass.

“It was a little uncomfortable at first,” Schoen said at the “Giants 100: A Night with Legends” event last week. “I think NFL Films does a great job. I think it’s gonna be a good project. But never fully got comfortable with the cameras around you all the time.”

Daboll found he could take a different, more tactical approach.

He figured out early in the process he could bring his phone into Schoen’s office and put some music on, and the show couldn’t use the footage.

“I’d be listening to whatever music, and I’d be talking to Joe, and I knew that part wouldn’t be on the show. So for me, it was great,” Daboll said at the same event, drawing laughs from the crowd.

The show’s structure will be largely chronological, highlighting the NFL’s major offseason events, including the combine, the start of free agency and the NFL Draft. Secondary events like college pro days (NFL Films crews attended a handful of pro days, including LSU’s with Malik Nabers), college all-star games and team visits. There’s also footage from when the Giants acquired two-time Pro Bowl pass rusher Brian Burns in a trade with the Carolina Panthers at the start of free agency and of quarterback Daniel Jones’ ongoing rehabilitation process from a torn ACL.

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“They’re solving a puzzle, right?” Camarata said. “So every week you gain new information you didn’t have the week before. So as we told the story of that work being done, you kind of needed to follow the bouncing ball through the offseason. We knew the tentpoles, but we also needed to follow the news cycle.”

Shooting footage is only half the process. Sorting through five months of footage and editing it down was a monstrous task and put the documentarians in some unfamiliar territory, said Emily Cameron, another one of the showrunners with NFL Films. Unlike the camp or in-season versions of “Hard Knocks” where games serve as natural starting or end points, this had no set immediate formula or resolution. For example, the cameras were rolling for conversations that occurred around every single potential free agent and draft prospect. NFL Films had to devise a logging code system to organize their data to reference back to. That way, say when the Giants drafted Nabers, the crew could quickly pull up the team’s conversations about him.

While nothing was off-limits during the filming process, the show was vetted by the Giants.

“We do have final editorial control, thank goodness,” Schoen said with a laugh at the “A Night with Legends” event. “It’s the first time (doing an offseason series), so some of the stuff that they put in, they just don’t understand the domino effect to some of these conversations because we’re about to have a season in 2024.”

What has come together as a result is something the Giants organization is excited to share, and it has even surprised some NFL Films veterans who worked on the original “Hard Knocks.”

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“I think everyone in the building who captured one of these episodes has been like ‘Wow, this is stuff we really haven’t seen before,’” Cameron said. “And I think a lot of them are like, ‘Wow, this is way more compelling than I thought it would be.’ Because it’s not player driven. It’s front office driven. And I think a lot of people were skeptical about whether that would be entertaining. It has proven to be very entertaining.”

(Photo: Kevin R. Wexler / USA Today)