Fangio cautions that Raiders could be setting 'a trap' for Broncos on HBO's 'Hard Knocks'

In case you missed it, the Oakland Raiders were the featured team on HBO's Hard Knocks this year. Each and every summer, Hard Knocks goes behind the NFL scenes to chronicle a team's training camp, preseason and ultimately, final roster cuts.

Suffice to say, it's great sports programming. This year it was perhaps a little more compelling because it gave Denver Broncos fans a behind-the-curtain look at a bitter Division rival and one whom the team will face twice in 2019.

The always entertaining Jon Gruden helped make Hard Knocks even more of a hit this year, along with the whacked-out diva antics of Antonio Brown. Seriously, Brown is a kind of a lunatic.

Speaking for myself as a digital journalist on the Broncos beat, I watched these five Raiders episodes with interest, looking for any morsel or nugget that might clue me into what's in store for the Broncos this year.

The Broncos themselves have paid some attention to it, though the team won't admit much publicly. In August, head coach Vic Fangio let slip that Denver's V.P. of Public Relations, Patrick Smyth, was combing through the episodes looking for anything that might interest Fangio and his staff. Still, Fangio's tonality has been mostly dismissive regarding Hard Knocks all summer.

However, on Wednesday, Fangio was a little more forthcoming with how he views the hit cable show. Suffice to say, the grizzled veteran NFL coach sees Hard Knocks through a lens of — call it — football espionage.

“I’m always of the mode—because they get to edit everything that goes out there—that if it looks like you’re getting a crumb, that maybe they’re planting the trap," Fangio said on Wednesday. "I don’t put a lot into it.”

There's plenty of football intelligence to be gleaned by watching Hard Knocks, but how meaningful is it, really? Fangio's right.

NFL teams don't control everything that Hard Knocks chooses to publish but if there's anything 'state-secret level' that a Jon Gruden or Mike Mayock doesn't want out there, you can believe it won't show up in the final production.

So, a guy like Fangio has to assume that any intelligence that's in Hard Knocks is there because the Raiders want it to be there.

There's one scene in episode four where Gruden tells one of his assistants, regarding Antonio Brown, 'I want to see him at the X'. Even if all a spying team like the Broncos could glean on Brown, aside from his extreme hubris and conceit, was that Gruden wanted him to play the X-receiver role exclusively at one practice, how much is that really going to help them?

News flash: it won't.

Again, there's some background info that might be good to know, like which players are banged up and how they got hurt. There's even a utility for Broncos players watching any Raiders clips of individual reps in training camp, to kind of see what technique or moves an opponent they expect to see in the regular season might present.

But at the end of the day, Fangio is basically of the opinion that if the Raiders allowed information to make a final cut, it's because they want the other 31 teams of the NFL to see it. Bait and switch.

Follow Chad on Twitter @ChadNJensen and @MileHighHuddle.