Hard Knocks Begins To Document Bengals’ Division Of Labor

The Bengals come off their bye week Monday to find NFL Films at the Paycor Stadium door with the hardest knock of all.

The eyes and ears of the league have returned to a set they find as comfortable as summer stock to begin filming a Hard Knocks HBO documentary that spans the last hard six weeks of the AFC North winter.

“I lead all operations in the field, but I wanted to headquarter myself here,” says Steve Trout, the senior director of the project who cut his teeth on the 2009 series at Bengals training camp and still talks to the stars of that show such as Chad Johnson and Marvin Lewis.

“I’ve got six directors out there, but I feel comfortable here. I know the stadium well, I know the facility well.”

So will everybody else soon enough. The first show airs a week from Tuesday, on Dec. 3, a little more than 48 hours after the Bengals play the Steelers Sunday (1 p.m.-Cincinnati’s Local 12) at Paycor that is part of NFL Films’ first attempt at chronicling all four teams in a division during a season.

Any resemblance to a training camp story is purely coincidental.

“The stakes,” says Trout of the biggest difference between the August show and this one. “I tell teams, ‘Look, by the third day you’ll forget we’re here.’ They chuckle and then they do. It’s getting them to just trust us and look past us. We’re not here to sensationalize anything. We want to show how smart it takes to be in that proverbial room. But these are real games and that’s the big difference with August.”

So the show’s footprint in the building is smaller than at training camp. Thanks to that and the way technology has shrunk 2009 into 2024, only one truck was needed to bring in the equipment. Trout’s army is lean and light while taking up half of Paycor’s TV production office.

He has two or three camera crews manned by one or two people culled from a group of ten. There are 16 robotic cameras, smaller and quieter than…