Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 14 years or don’t care about football, you know that the highlight of every NFL season actually happens before any games are played. That’s right, folks—I’m talking about Hard Knocks, the reality show that follows one struggling team as it attempts to pull itself up by its bootstraps, grab the ball by the seams, and convince America that this is the year it gets to the playoffs.
Narrator: It doesn’t.
The teams that participate don’t usually end the year with a winning record: The Rams went 4–12 in 2016, the Bucs went 5–11 in 2017, the Browns went 7-8-1 (which was, admittedly, an improvement on the past 11 years) in 2018.