Giants can’t make the same ‘Hard Knocks’ spotlight mistake that Jets did

There was a time when John Mara, the Giants owner and CEO, said in jest (we think) that he would be dead before the Giants would ever agree to HBO featuring his team on its popular and polarizing “Hard Knocks’’ series.

Based his aversion to transparency when it comes to the inner workings of his team, Giants head coach Brian Daboll likely welcomed the “Hard Knocks’’ idea and the HBO cameras the way Bill Belichick might welcome the paparazzi aboard his boat “VIII Rings’’ to follow him and his 23-year-old cheerleader Jordon Hudson for a day.

You get the idea.

And yet … here we are.

On Tuesday night at 9 p.m., “Hard Knocks: Offseason with the New York Giants” airs the first of its five-part series.

Distractions, anyone?

Daboll goes out of his way to avoid distractions the way people try to avoid COVID-19. HBO’s presence in these “Hard Knocks’’ episodes, while entertaining, can also be intrusive. Daboll would rather have a bad case of poison ivy for a month than allow distractions to infiltrate the sacred sanctum of his meeting rooms and locker room.

Maybe the Giants can learn a little bit from the Jets, who are two-time veterans of the pitfalls that come with “Hard Knocks.’’ The Jets’ most recent stint was last season, which devolved into months of controversy and angst after Aaron Rodgers blew out his Achilles and the Jets’ season blew up.

The following words from star cornerback Sauce Gardner resonated when it was all over:

“Some of the stuff in the offseason with Aaron, with ‘Hard Knocks,’ I feel like we lost track of some things,’’ Gardner said at the end of the 2023 season. “When there’s a lot of cameras and a lot of stuff going on, you can lose track of the main thing.’’

The Jets’ first HBO “Hard Knocks” go at it came in 2010, with Rex Ryan the head coach and Darrelle Revis’ holdout at the center of the team.

Who can forget when cornerback Antonio Cromartie, who was notorious for having eight children with numerous different women, being asked by an HBO producer to name all of his kids and it took him some 40 seconds to name them all?

Or Ryan barking to his team after a poor practice at Hofstra University: “Let’s go eat a G–damned snack.’’ Or the contentious contract negotiations between Revis and GM Mike Tannenbaum?

“The 2010 Jets changed the profile and the success of ‘Hard Knocks’ forever,” Patrick Kelleher, the executive producer of NFL Films, said last year.

Don’t expect that kind of juicy soap operatic drama to drip from the Giants’ stint on the show. In a way, this is a soft landing on “Hard Knocks’’ because their five episodes were shot during the offseason. So there was no nonsense attached to locker room drama or game results.

Still, the Giants have not been without their offseason drama, beginning with Daboll firing defensive coordinator Wink Martindale and the Giants scouting top college quarterbacks so aggressively it had to make injury-prone incumbent Daniel Jones wonder what his future is.

The flat-line Jones, of course, is not prone to delivering any headline-inducing stuff to the HBO cameras the way Rodgers was with the Jets.

There, too, is the Saquon Barkley issue, with Barkley demanding a long-term deal for security and the Giants wanting no part of making that commitment. Barkley, one of the most popular Giants of the most recent iteration of the team, signed with the bitter-rival Eagles. Surely HBO viewers will be curious to see if there’s any behind-the-scenes juice to come out of that divorce.

The Giants, it should be noted, had final editorial say on this project, so don’t expect a lot of explosive moments. What you’re almost certain to get is an inside look at some conversations (though not revealing) between Daboll and general manager Joe Schoen around draft time and regarding offseason moves.

Whether the show gets into the breakup between Daboll and Martindale or the free agency decisions to let Barkley and popular safety Xavier McKinney go or how extensive their homework was on the top quarterbacks before the draft remains to be seen.

What you surely will see is some behind-the-scenes stuff about the team’s trade for defensive star Brian Burns and their drafting of receiver Malik Nabers.

Rest assured, the Giants will not allow any of the entertaining calamity that came out of the Jets’ two “Hard Knocks’’ runs trickled out for public consumption. Because, as Sauce Gardner so perfectly stated at the end of the Jets’ season when assessing the “Hard Knocks’’ effect: “At the end of the day, we still got to win.’’

So, too, do the Giants, who unlike the Jets unwittingly may have, cannot allow their players to “lose track of the main thing.’’