We finally have our next team for HBO’s ongoing football series that is never quite as good as you want it to be: Hard Knocks! It’s gonna be the Oakland Raiders.

It was probably inevitable. Out of all the teams in the main running (Raiders, Giants, 49ers, Skins) the Raiders were the clear and obvious favorite. The Skins might have been okay with the QB situation as it is, and any light shown on Dan “literally the worst” Snyder would probably be infuriating. The 49ers might have been fun with Kyle Shanahan and the most handsome QB in the game but they are mostly unknowns now. Seriously, the 49ers used to have a ton of recognizable names on them, now I can name like 5 players. The Giants were probably an excellent choice until they jettisoned Beckham. Now it’s just Eli and Daniel Jones, two of the most boring pieces of white bread you’d probably watch. Saquon is a boy scout so he wouldn’t be interesting. Pat Shurmur isn’t a big personality. So that leaves the Raiders. Outside maybe trying to save them for their first year in Vegas, this was the obvious front-runner.

I am looking forward to seeing Jon Gruden be a madman. Yelling at players and then being a child and using stupid Grudenisms like GRINDERS. Antonio Brown should be a highlight as you know whatever the hell he does it will be eclectic and weird. Vontaze Burfict? They could play up all this interconnected drama. The last time Richie Incognito was on Hard Knocks it was Jonathan Martin’s rookie year, and you see him dealing with shit before we knew the extent of it. Seriously if you can go back and re-watch that season for those parts, it’s illuminating. It probably didn’t help Martin’s troubled mind to have cameras on him for that first camp.

But honestly we know what Hard Knocks is gonna do. We will get snippets of all these players and drama for sure. It’ll occasionally be interesting. We might get lucky and see some flare-ups. Instead the show will do what it always does: find the human drama in the players who are on the bubble. “WILL THIS GUY MAKE THE TEAM?!?!” you ask, watching him have great moments during practice, and then he gets unceremoniously cut because he never really had a chance but the show pretended he did to create drama. It’s the Hard Knocks formula, and it works well enough.

I’ll probably watch it since I’ve been to lazy to cancel my HBO subscription so far as the wife has been going through Deadwood.