For the first time, the Pittsburgh Steelers will be featured on the NFL’s iconic series, Hard Knocks.
However, not everyone on the Steelers is happy about the outcome. The Steelers and the entire AFC North will appear on the in-season version of Hard Knocks, while the Chicago Bears are the series’ traditional training camp version.
Steelers team captain Cam Heyward is not happy that the team will be featured on the program, going as far as to say that he hated it when it was announced.
“I hated it. I don’t want to be on this,” Heyward said on the Not Just Football Podcast. “The locker room is the locker room, and I just don’t want that getting messed up. There’s so many inside jokes, so many people. There’s so many people, like, you would assume everybody’s a jerk if you heard everything. But it comes from a loving place, and it comes from a caring place. We all want to be better, and we joke a lot. We poke and prod at each other, but it doesn’t always come off that way. And so, that’s the only thing I really worry about.”
Since the inception of Hard Knocks in 2001, the Steelers have been one of the only teams to be featured on the program. Even still, they will not be featured completely in this version of Hard Knocks since they will share it with the Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, and Cleveland Browns. Long snapper Christian Kuntz holds similar concerns to Heyward about the team being featured on the series.
“I agree that people could get misinterpreted or other people could be misguided on how they feel about somebody based on what they hear on TV,” Kuntz said. “Where it could be just a joke, where it a hundred percent is a joke or an inside joke. It’s just a locker room’s like a safe place. That facility is like a safe place and you’re gonna have cameras everywhere. It’s in the middle of like Week 8, heat of the battle with division games and stuff.”
The series will air on HBO and Max during the season. Most of the filming will occur in the second half of the season, when the Steelers have all six divisional games after their bye week.
