The history of the sports docuseries is on the walls and roaming the halls of an office complex in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, just outside of Philadelphia.

During a recent visit to NFL Films’ headquarters in South Jersey, the walls were adorned with classic football magazine covers and newspaper front pages, as well as original art created by former NFL Films president Steve Sabol. A climate controlled film archive holds decades worth of footage from live games, interviews, and other footage, a trove that helps power the studio’s documentary programming.

And roaming the halls was former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who was operating a truck bay (in his signature hoodie, of course) so that he could grab some things to prepare for his appearance on that evening’s Manningcast on ESPN. The physical manifestation of football history, and sports media history.

Sports docs are everywhere. Feature films, docuseries, access shows, every streaming platform has them, and every TV channel that televises live sports wants more of them. As sports become more central to TV channels and streaming services, sports-related content is also growing in strategic importance.

NFL Films, which was founded in 1962 by Ed Sabol and his son Steve, can be credited with helping to create the sports doc format that we know today (not to mention things we now take for granted like instant replay). But the company — which operates as a league-owned Hollywood-quality production studio — has no qualms about breaking with its own traditions.

Steve Sabol’s office is now a conference room, but his desk is still there, just as it looked right before he passed away from brain cancer in 2012. Inside is a note from Sabol, which Ken Rodgers, executive producer at NFL Films, occasionally steals a glance at. It implores those at NFL Films to “keep tradition alive by breaking with tradition,” Rodgers says.

“I think he was talking about format and courage,” he adds. “There’s a very easy instinct to copy past successes.”

So with the demand for sports content never higher, NFL Films is changing how it does business too. A big part of that is leaning into personality-driven programming, a shift for a company most frequently known for its cinéma vérité-style documentaries.

In January, it will produce its first late night show, They Call It Late Night, which will be hosted by Philadelphia Eagles legend Jason Kelce. NFL Films produced Kelce, the documentary film about the former NFL star that landed at Prime Video last year. Keith Cossrow, vp and head of content for NFL Films says that the company built a relationship with him through that film, and that when Kelce began talking to networks about an NFL analyst role, he always had the late night idea in the back of his mind.

“[He said] no matter where I go, there’s one thing I want to do: ‘I want to make a late night show,’” Cossrow recalls. “’I grew up watching Conan [O’Brien] and [David] Letterman, and they’re my heroes, and I love what Bill Maher does with the panel on Friday nights on HBO, and I want to have a late night show about sports, and I want to do it once a week, and I want to have a live band with horns. It’s got to have a horn section. And I want to shoot it in Philly, and I want you guys to produce it.’ We were like, ‘we’re in, we’ll figure this out.’ I got goosebumps.”

Ross Ketover, senior executive at NFL Films, calls the late night show  “scary and nerve wracking… Totally high-wire for us without a net.”

“Comedy is hard, sports and comedy is hard, us doing essentially a live studio show is something very new and exciting, but Jason is just a force of nature, and we’re so excited to be in business with him,” Ketover adds. “The relationship we started with Peyton and Eli [Manning] doing those shows, working with talent is something really new and exciting for us that I think has inspired invigorated a lot of our producers here.”

That is also obvious when walking through Belichick’s custom studio in the NFL Films offices. The coach has his own office and conference room, but his studio functions as a multi-purpose production hub for his podcasts, his appearances on the Manningcast and The Pat McAfee Show and other media hits.

“What he really loves, I think, is having a facility,” Rodgers says. “He is our official coach in residence at the National Football League, working here in NFL films three days a week … coach wanted to create a space that felt like you were visiting him into his office, and it’s not all that different than what his office looked like in New England.”

Indeed, his studio is filled to the brim with memorabilia and awards, from signed footballs to a pair of Yao Ming’s size 18 sneakers.

“You could show him one play and he could talk about it for two hours,” Ketover says. “We need to lean into that. Don’t make him do something that he’s not comfortable doing. Let’s do something that is his strength, that he’s passionate about, and that’s certainly how we’re focusing on working with his talent.”

The Kelce and Belichick projects are emblematic of the new sports media, where the athletes and coaches are the talent and producers, with ownership of what they make. Consider the deals that Pat McAfee and Peyton Manning (both former NFL players) have cut with ESPN, which televises their shows via licensing deals.

“I think [Kelce] looked at what Peyton’s done and what LeBron has done, and what some other people have done, and I think that’s the model a lot of guys want to follow now, is they want to build their own entity and be able to produce their own content and have ownership of it,” Cossrow says.

NFL Films is also operating as a partner to Skydance, where the league is an investor in the sports-focused studio JV Skydance Sports. Ketover says that his studio is in active discussions with Skydance sports about what it can bring to the table, be it footage shot at games to add authenticity to scripted programming, or original ideas and concepts.

But NFL Films is also adjusting how it approaches its bread-and-butter product: The football docuseries.

When Hard Knocks debuted on HBO in 2001, it was an unusual product, giving viewers access to their favorite football teams that was, at the time, unprecedented.

“Hard Knocks was a reaction to NFL films of the 70s and 80s, which was mythology, mythologizing players, making them larger than life, creating heroes out of football players,” Rodgers says. “We turned that on its head in 2001 and said, these larger than life figures, let us show you who they are as men, sometimes women, when it comes to the front office and ownership and now on the football field, but our goal was to tell you about the person in the uniform, rather than create a mythology around a person and make them larger than life.”

19 seasons and dozens of Emmy Awards later, the HBO series shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. In fact, NFL Films has expanded it, last year it debuted an offseason edition, which followed the New York Giants front office, catching shocking moments like a phone call with the team and star running back Saquon Barkley, who ultimately signed with the Eagles.

“Doubters would have been like, there’s no action, there’s no football,” Ketover recalls. “You’re taking someone in a place they haven’t been before, and that’s the key to these access series.”

“The offseason show has a lot fewer players, and it’s a workplace drama,” Rodgers says.

Indeed, Cossrow says that he has heard from a number of white-collar execs in various industries, stunned at the access, but who added that they hadn’t seen a show that captured a high-stakes office job in as dramatic a fashion.

“I cannot tell you how many people who work in white collar corridors of power have said to us that Giants show is incredible,” he says.

But the next big push will come Dec. 3, when HBO debuts a new version of Hard Knocks: An in-season edition, with the show following not one team but four of them, all of the AFC North.

If the offseason Hard Knocks is a workplace drama, and the classic training camp Hard Knocks functions as a reality competition series, focusing on who makes the team and who gets cut, the in-season installment is something new altogether, teams working together to win the division, with a winner guaranteed by the end.

“Someone has to win that division, and it injects stakes,” Rodgers says. “That is just a better way to tell that story of the end of a football season.”

Ketover says that NFL Films is installing dozens of remote robotic cameras in team facilities across the AFC North “so we’re not distracting, we’re not sitting there with a camera over a guy’s head and a boom in his face.”

“We’re not giving away any of their proprietary secrets. We’re not going to show their audibles to the rest of the league,” he adds.

It’s all part of a complex dance that involves the league, its 32 teams, and its hundreds of players.

“We never want any club or player that’s participating in our shows to feel like the platform  [that is running the show] has more control than they do,” says Jessica Boddy, vp of commercial operations & business affairs. “That’s the most complex thing to navigate.”

But in interviews with The Hollywood Reporter just weeks before its debut, executive at NFL Films were still figuring out the choreography of telling such a complicated story on such a demanding timeline.

“It’s going to be so hard. There’s so much we haven’t figured out, but I think that’s the most fun part of our job, to be immersed in a creative process, working collaboratively with group of people who are totally invested in something,” Cossrow says. “And when you watch a show on HBO, you expect something special, premium, highest caliber storytelling, and we take that challenge head on every time.

“I think we all know it won’t be perfect,” he adds. “The first episode will have its bumps, but we’ll work through the process, it’ll get better every week, and hopefully by the end of this season, we’ve created something that’s unique and special and engages fans and non-fans, because it’s just good TV.”

The non-fans part is pretty important, both to NFL Films and the league itself. Netflix’s Quarterback, which debuted last year, over-indexed with women, and the league is eager to expand the game’s reach to new demographics. The league notes that both Quarterback and is followup Receiver ranked number one on the Netflix charts.

They are shows that are reaching an entirely different audience than Hard Knocks, a big bet that the league hopes will lead to a bigger fandom for the game.

Rodgers says that the company has a culture of making big bets, one that was forged by the Sabols themselves, and that everyone who works there still takes to heart.

“Steve used to give out $500 cash every year on an annual basis to the most magnificent failure,” he says. “So if you tried something and it was terrible, but it was magnificent in its failure, he’d give you five hundreds. And that was a way to encourage risk taking, which has to be done in the creative world.”

That is present in NFL Films’ weekly video meetings.

When you first walk into the main lobby, off to the right is an auditorium that seats a couple hundred people. Once a week, Cossrow, Rodgers and other top executives gather producers and staff from around the company to review the tape, so to speak. They may watch a rough cut of something NFL Films is producing, or something unique produced by a competitor.

The only rule is that people give feedback, and don’t feel afraid to hold back.

“I’m always amazed that someone that’s been here 30 years will make a comment and someone who’s been here 30 days disagrees with it, and is able to speak up in that atmosphere,” Rodgers says. “It’s very much encouraged to hear the different points of view, and that gives you permission that you don’t have to go with the crowd.”

Football is without question the most popular programming on TV, maybe even the last vestige of monoculture in a world where entertainment is splintered between social video platforms and streaming giants.

But NFL Films is the league’s gateway to those worlds, telling stories outside the lines, while pushing the boundaries of the sports doc format it helped forge 60 years ago.

This story first appeared in the Dec. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.