“The expectations for this season are the highest in our history.”
That could be Rex Ryan talking about the Jets, but it’s Steve Sabol, the president of NFL Films, talking about the upcoming season of “Hard Knocks,” which features Gang Green.
“I had a meeting with our crew and started it out by saying: ‘In all the 40 years of NFL Films history, this will be the most-watched, most-publicized, most-scrutinized, most-critiqued, most-creatively challenging, most-expensively produced series we have ever done.’ If that doesn’t psych you up, then you don’t have a pulse,” Sabol said.
“Hard Knocks” will take viewers through the Jets training camp from the first day at Cortland to the last preseason game. There are 25 hours of film a day being recorded in Cortland for the five shows. That film is taken in two shifts from the Jets’ upstate New York training camp to Mt. Laurel, N.J. — the home of NFL Films — where it gets edited by 15 producers into sub-clippings and then will be put together Tuesday night. The script is then e-mailed to the narrator, Liev Schreiber, who is doing a movie in Barcelona.
“It’s the most-challenging show we do; not only the capturing of everything, but making it coherent and into storylines,” said Sabol, who had no comment when asked about one of the top producers on the show holding out for more guaranteed money.
The second episode will feature the Jets-Giants Monday night preseason opener at the New Meadowlands Stadium. There will be as many NFL Films cameras at that game as there will be for the Super Bowl. The company has already arranged for police escorts to take the film from the stadium to Mt. Laurel at halftime and at its conclusion.
NFL Films pursued the Jets last year, but were rebuffed and instead focused on the Bengals. It seems to have worked out just fine as the Jets are coming off a run to the AFC Championship Game and have a team loaded with ready-made with playmakers and plotlines.
“Rex and Mike just felt they wanted to get one year under their belt before doing it,” Sabol said. “Football is a sport of grand passions and bold gestures and no one team embodies that more than the Jets right now from the players to the coaches to the owner to the fact that they are in New York to the expectations on the team. This team is one of the big stories of the year before one down of football has been played.”
It is a documentary-style show, but the cast of characters could come straight from a daytime soap opera. The loudmouth coach played by Ryan, his equally talkative sidekick Bart Scott, Mark Sanchez as the pretty-boy quarterback and Darrelle Revis as the dangerous outsider who is holding out.
But the show won’t solely focus on the team’s superstars.
“It could be a couple of rookies struggling to realize the dream of making it in the NFL . . . an old pro struggling to hold onto his dream . . .” Sabol said. “What ‘Hard Knocks’ gives you is an insight into the team and the personality where you can’t get anywhere else.
. . . You are really going to see how this team things, how this team prepares, the core of this team.”
justin.terranova@nypost.com