TAMPA, Fla. -- It's early Saturday morning and Matt Dissinger, director of HBO's "Hard Knocks" and producer for NFL Films, gets a phone call. His crew -- some of them fresh off the team charter from Cincinnati, which meant no one got to bed until 3:30 a.m. -- believes a cut is about to happen.
Kicker Roberto Aguayo, who has been entrenched in a kicking battle with Nick Folk, missed a field goal and an extra point in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ preseason opener against the Bengals on Friday night. They decide to mobilize or execute a "fire drill," as they call it.
"Get to One Buc Place by 9 a.m.," they decide.
The crew's instincts are correct. Bucs coach Dirk Koetter and general manager Jason Licht met earlier to make the decision. Koetter then calls Aguayo into his office. The cameras are rolling, capturing it all.
It will play out Tuesday night on the second episode of "Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers" at 10 p.m. ET on HBO.
"We try to maintain a respectful distance when doing it," said Dissinger, who's been with the show since 2007. "Just as much as Dirk Koetter and Jason Licht hate cutting players, we hate shooting it. But it's unfortunately part of the business.
"It's terrible. And it's also terrible afterwards when you [say], ‘Uh, can I ask you a few questions?' But it's part of camp, it's part of the reality of the NFL. ... We work really hard to get the audience invested in these guys and to really show a well-rounded portrait of who they are."
The crew never knows when a cut is actually going to happen, until it happens. Instead, a camera operator stays in the coach's room for 14-16 hours per day, capturing meetings, phone calls and sometimes dead silence.
Perhaps that's why Koetter said the cameras don't affect the way he talks to Aguayo or any other player he has to break the news to. They've become part of the scenery.
"The cameras don't make it harder," Koetter said. "It's hard because you're dealing with a person's career and a person's life, and whether it's Roberto Aguayo or anyone else that we have to let go -- I mean, I see what these guys go through.
That Bucs kicker competition?
— NFL (@NFL) August 15, 2017
It just got very real.
You won't want to miss #HardKnocks. TONIGHT (10pm ET/PT) pic.twitter.com/3EmX1B3ofZ
"It's one thing in any job if you were letting go of a guy that didn't care or wasn't trying to give you his best or wasn't doing things the way you asked him, but that's hardly ever the case. When these guys are out there and they are trying to do it the way we ask them and they're giving it their all and it isn't good enough sometimes, that's difficult."
Koetter finds that the best approach is to draw from his own personal experiences as a head coach, from the times he's gotten the dreaded phone call or has been called into the office.
"I just always try to frame it with those guys when I talk to them is, ‘This doesn't affect your manhood,'" said Koetter, who tells them, "‘I've been fired, and you get over it and you learn from it and apply it to your next opportunity.'"
No one but Licht, Koetter and the crew knows how Aguayo handles the news -- that will be revealed Tuesday night -- but Aguayo doesn't seem to be bothered by the cameras, which means Dissinger's goal has been accomplished.
"The cameras don't make it harder. It's hard because you're dealing with a person's career and a person's life, and whether it's Roberto Aguayo or anyone else that we have to let go -- I mean, I see what these guys go through." Dirk Koetter
Aguayo landed on his feet, too, when the Chicago Bears claimed him on Monday. Ironically, he is taking part in a kicking battle with former Bucs kicker Connor Barth, who was ousted from Tampa right after Aguayo was drafted.
"At the end of the day, I've dealt with the media," Aguayo said. "I've had highs at Florida State and dealing with the media coming into the NFL, there were highs, there were lows. At the end of the day, I know the type of man I am. I know the integrity and what I have inside me. That doesn't define me as a man.
"I'm defined by how I keep my head up and keep pushing. That's in the past now. Yeah, at the time it hurt. But there [are] new opportunities and I'm here now, so this is my next opportunity and I'm looking forward to making the most of it."
Sometimes players don't take cuts so well and things can get tense. That's what happened for Dissinger during his first year with the show, when "Hard Knocks" was in Kansas City to cover training camp with the Chiefs.
He was the unlucky crew member camped out in director of pro personnel Ray Farmer's office the day quarterback Casey Printers, who was battling for the third quarterback job, was let go.
"I still remember it like it was yesterday," said Dissinger, who spent the entire camp in that office. "He was not happy and ready to fight to state his case when he got cut. ... That's one that stood out to me as a guy that just didn't agree with their evaluations of him."
Printers told Farmer, "Look at the guys I was performing with ... hell, I had to make chicken salad out of chicken s---!"
"He just wore his emotions on his sleeve," Dissinger said. "It got imprinted in my brain."
Unlike Aguayo, Printers never got another NFL contract after that.
"We build relationships with these guys as people -- we get to know them, their families, we root for them unapologetically on the sidelines. But unfortunately, it is what it is," Dissinger said of the cuts.
"Our hope is to show you, ‘Hey, here is three weeks of this guy's life, what he was going through. It's obviously moments from here and there, but you cobble them together and get an idea of what that experience is like, what the pressure is like.
"Hopefully you understand a little bit more and empathize with Roberto a little bit more. That's always the goal for us, to bring that human element to a game where guys were face masks. Sometimes you might not even know what some of your favorite players look like. 'Hard Knocks' is an opportunity for us to sort of humanize and get you to empathize with them."