Everyone knew this season of “Hard Knocks” was going to be different; it had to be due to the pandemic. There were no padded practices to show, preseason preparation to highlight or camp fights to film.
Instead, the season premiere on Tuesday night was mostly about Rams and Chargers players arriving for camp, with a sprinkle of walk-throughs, COVID-19 testing and Zoom conference calls. It still worked and the episode was entertaining enough to keep viewers intrigued, but the audience was substantially smaller than in an average year.
According to Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal, Episode 1 of “Hard Knocks: Los Angeles” drew only 273,000 viewers on TV, which is down from the 705,000 who tuned in for the first episode last year, when the Raiders were the subject of the show.
It was expected that ratings might be down slightly due to the lack of football actually taking place this summer, but that’s a huge drop-off from a year ago. Even if another 175,000 or so tuned in via streaming like last year, the overall viewership would be a little more than half of 2019’s premiere.
Things will get more interesting from here with players being cut, padded practices taking place after Aug. 17 and the season approaching. But needless to say, HBO was hoping for bigger numbers than the ones it drew Tuesday night.
