It’s been known since March that the Seahawks will be the preseason Hard Knocks team for 2026 — and that the Patriots will finally take their Hard Knocks turn in 2027.
It’s not yet known which teams will take center stage for in-season Hard Knocks.
In 2024, the in-season version expanded its focus from one team to a full division, in part to dilute the competitive impact of the intrusion during a time when the games count. The first year, the series tracked the teams of the AFC North. Last year, it was the NFC East.
This year, there’s been no announcement yet. The 2025 teams were announced in May. In 2024, the NFL disclosed the division in June.
We’ve made multiple attempts over the past week to get an answer as to when the teams will be known. To date, there’s no indication as to when the division will be disclosed — or if there will even be an in-season Hard Knocks in 2026.
There are three potential explanations for the silence. One, they’ve decided not to announce the division in advance. Two, they’ve yet to pick the division. Three, they’ve decided not to do it at all.
The in-season version gets easily lost in the shuffle, especially as the league shuffles around its schedule to maximize standalone windows. With games to watch on Thursdays, Sundays, Mondays, and (this year) multiple Wednesdays and multiple Fridays, would enough people watch a weekly look at four different teams?
If it happens this year, the practical options are down to four divisions. With a team from the NFC West serving as the focal point for Hard Knocks this year and a team from the AFC East doing it next year, those two divisions presumably aren’t in play.
That leaves the AFC South, the AFC West, the NFC North, or the NFC South.
Or maybe the plug has quietly been pulled on the whole thing. If shifting to a full division was aimed at avoiding putting one team at a disadvantage in its own division, the full division ends up at a disadvantage in comparison to the other teams in the conference with which the Hard Knocks teams are competing for wild-card berths and playoff positioning. (Especially if the league is moving toward a new seeding structure that doesn’t guarantee a home game for a division winner, which is expected to happen when the season expands to 18 games.)
Maybe, just like the offseason version of Hard Knocks (which was so revealing and compelling when the Giants did it in 2024 that no one else will do it), Hard Knocks will be reverting to a preseason exercise only.
There’s another possible outcome, in our view. In lieu of rolling out the in-season Hard Knocks episodes during the season, maybe the time to unveil the series will be the upcoming offseason. It doesn’t hurt the Quarterback series that the show arrives months after the prior season ended, when there’s nothing else going on for NFL fans to consume.
Frankly, the best approach would be to capture the raw audio and video as to all teams, and to decide after the season ends which division provides the most interesting subject for the series. Or, if the cameras and microphones will be present for all teams, why not put together an in-season series that looks at the most interesting moments from the full league?
However it goes, it’s an NFL decision and not an ESPN call. NFL Films remained with the NFL after the ESPN merger with NFL Media.
For the NFL, the ultimate business decision could come down to whether it makes business sense to not do in-season Hard Knocks at all — or whether it makes more sense to embrace a more ambitious project that entails getting footage from 32 teams and editing an after-the-fact Hard Knocks that could have much more appeal than focusing on one division, while also eliminating any concerns about competitive disadvantage.
