Since the NFL revealed behind-the-scenes conversations that the L.A. Rams were having on their new segment “The Pick Is In”, there’s been a lot of speculation about whether the Rams really wanted Brock Bowers or Byron Murphy, and what it feels like to have your business aired to the public like that. Apparently, the teams on the other side of the phone had no idea that Sean McVay was being recorded by NFL films and that some of their business was being revealed as well.
In a post for MMQB on SI, Albert Breer talked to Rams COO Kevin Demoff and GM Les Snead about their feelings on the increasing amount of behind-the-scenes content being released to the public in the NFL’s effort to get more engagement and make more money:
“When you do Hard Knocks or All or Nothing, like we did, or you do the Behind the Grind series, which we do annually, when it’s just your team, it makes the narrative much tighter,” Rams COO Kevin Demoff says. “This is something that I’d think about with the [NFC North] division Hard Knocks. Your story gets shared with a lot of other stories. You don’t always have the singular storytelling you might like to have in a series like this.
“That’s not to say that it’s not the control or the editing that you’d want to have. But if NFL Films has another team—or whether it’s Netflix and Quarterback—when they’re trying to balance so many stories, a story you might like and are passionate about and want to be told and explored may not be a story that’s told and explored in a way you’d hoped it be.”
The Rams’ brass has much experience on Hard Knocks as any team, having been on the show in 2016 and 2020. Both offseason were incredibly tumultuous for the Rams already, since the team moved to L.A. in 2016 and there was the pandemic in 2020.
Demoff was mostly concerned about losing the ability for the Rams to control their own narrative.
“The more storytelling around your brand and your football team you can do, the better,” Demoff says. “These are great opportunities to showcase the people in your organization, your players, your coaches, your staff, and to bring fans into places that traditional media outlets don’t give them a glimpse into. We’re always trying to find ways to elevate the Rams’ brand in storytelling. And any chance we can get to bring people into the world of Sean [McVay] is a good thing.”
GM Les Snead, who was with the team for both Hard Knocks seasons, while McVay was only around for the 2020 version, texted Breer that content is just part of the business although he would like to be more involved in the final cut:
“The NFL is in the business of entertaining, via the game of football,” Rams GM Les Snead says, via text. “The NFL and our media partners are in the content business. And the content that makes up our particular show is the ecosystem that contains the game and all the interesting theory and nuance that goes into getting ready for Sundays during the fall. I think because of the overall popularity of our show, the structure of our season with less games and a lot more buildup, we have discovered that a lot of that buildup is interesting.
“Here we are, and it’ll be up to all of us within the game theory portion of the ecosystem to try to figure out what parts of the drama, of the buildup, are worth letting out of the bottle, so to speak. I do think it is very important to work together with the final editing so that we distribute newer, more novel content while not engineering unnecessary distractions.”
This year’s Hard Knocks will be the Chicago Bears, while the in-season Hard Knocks will be the entire AFC North.
And starting on July 2, the NFL will debut “Hard Knocks Offseason” with the New York Giants. That means that Hard Knocks has quickly changed from one team to six teams per year.
It’s only a matter of time before Snead, Demoff, and McVay are back on camera for NFL Films. Oh wait, they literally just were a month ago.