Seahawks GM John Schneider did his homework on ‘Hard Knocks’

Seattle Seahawks general manager John Schneider acknowledged Thursday his first reaction to the NFL asking the team to be on Hard Knocks” this season wasn’t necessarily enthusiastic.

“We’re just very protective of like how we do things and what our culture looks like,” Schneider said during an appearance on Seattle Sports 710 in his first public comments since the news broke earlier this week that the Seahawks will be featured on the show beginning in August.

The Seahawks had never been on “Hard Knocks” since the show debuted on HBO in 2001 each year focusing on an NFL team for a month or so during training camp with episodes airing each week in the run-up to the season.

Like many other execs and coaches of other teams who have been approached, Schneider said he “always worried” about sharing things that might tip off other organizations about how the Seahawks do things, as well as the presence of the video team and weekly episodes serving as a distraction during training camp.

But Schneider said the more he heard from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell when he called to say the league hoped to feature the Seahawks this year — the show is a production of the league-run NFL Films — the more he began to buy into it.

“When the commissioner called me about it, it made sense,” Schneider said, noting that the league expressed to the Seahawks how there were a number of players on the team it felt would make for good stories on the show.

“We’ve got some cool characters on this team that are great stories,” Schneider said.

The Seahawks were also told that their opponent in the Super Bowl in February — the New England Patriots — was also being asked to be on the show.

The Seahawks will be featured this year during the training camp show and the Patriots next year.

The Seahawks understood that the show’s importance to the league means that eventually every team is likely to be asked to be either on the training camp or regular-season versions.

“I mean, we avoided it for 17 years,” Schneider said, a reference to how long he has been GM.

As the league detailed in a news release this week, the five-episode series will debut on Tuesday, Aug. 11 at 6 p.m. PT and will debut new episodes — each roughly 55 minutes in length — each Tuesday until Sept. 8, which will be the day before the Seahawks are scheduled to open the season at Lumen Field.

That means “Hard Knocks” will follow the Seahawks through the opening of training camp and their three preseason games — two of which will be on the road, one of which is likely to feature at least one day of a joint practice with the opponent a few days before the game.

Schneider said he talked this week at the NFL league meetings in Phoenix with some other general managers of teams who have been on it in recent years, including Ryan Poles of the Bears, who were featured in 2024, to get their input.

“We’re going to work with the National Football League and the teams that have been through it before to help us (and) just make it a positive for the organization and have it not be as much of a distraction,” Schneider said. “… We’ll have plenty advice by the time we get there.”

Since the Seahawks won the Super Bowl two months ago they would not have been eligible for most of the time that the show has existed — for years only teams that had missed the playoffs each of the previous two years were eligible.

Those rules severely limited the pool of teams that were available for the show and the league relaxed the requirements a year ago to try to feature more high-profile teams and assure continuing interest in the show.

That resulted in the Buffalo Bills appearing on the show last year even though they had advanced to the AFC title game the year before.

Now the Seahawks and Patriots will be on the show over the next two training camps. Seattle will be the first defending Super Bowl champion on the show since the Baltimore Ravens in its first year 2001.

Schneider said he understands the show could be good PR for an organization that has won two Super Bowls since 2013 and has been one of the most consistently successful teams in the league over the past two decades.

“We’re so sheltered up here,” he said. “It will allow people to see how beautiful this city is.”

He said he also hopes it will allow viewers to get to know and “understand all the people that have supported this organization for a long, long time.”

Ultimately, he said, the goal will be a simple one.

“We’re going to make it as positive as we possibly can without sharing as much information as we possibly can, he said.