Joe Hortiz walked into one of the many lavish rooms inside the Los Angeles Chargers’ recently built state-of-the-art facility and saw a familiar face from the creative team. Hortiz, the Chargers’ GM, appeared refreshed, his energy matching a room that could be confused for a spa, with wallpaper of bright green plants with gold trimming surrounding the team’s bolt logo on the furthest end.
It was two weeks after every NFL GM’s most stressful period of the year. In fact, Hortiz had just finished displaying his completed draft board to a group of reporters when he heard about the other board that has brought the organization plenty of buzz in recent years.
“Hopefully, we can be as good as them with the draft, because they’re crushing it,” Hortiz says in the direction of David Bretto, the Chargers’ director of creative video.
Every January—or perhaps even as early as December—the Chargers’ most imaginative minds get together to put up their own board, the first of many brainstorming sessions for how to dominate the social and digital space for one day in the middle of May.
While we’ve known each team’s full slate of opponents for months, the day we find out the order—along with each game’s time slot and, correspondingly, the full schedule of prime-time dates, international affairs and holiday games—has become an offseason tentpole event.
The NFL’s schedule release day has become the “creative Super Bowl” for the 32 teams’ best content creators, bringing together people across various professions. Social media coordinators, graphic designers, video production members and even the not-so-artsy team employees pitch in to produce a distinctive schedule video that can reach as many people as possible—and gain bragging rights, of course.
Inadvertently, Hortiz’s praise might have added to the pressure weighing on Bretto during his most stressful period of the year. Even with months of preparation, Bretto couldn’t put aside the endless pit of anxiety because the most demanding 36 hours still hadn’t arrived. Somewhere in the shiny new facility, perhaps right now, depending on when you’re reading this, the Chargers’ creatives are working in a panic—and thriving because this is what they do best—to put the finishing touches on the 2025 schedule release video.
A few months back, the Chargers’ creatives settled on this year’s schedule video theme. The same is probably true for the other 31 teams. But they often don’t receive their respective schedules until a day before the league announces the dates for every game for the upcoming season, leading to an all-hands crunch to rearrange scenes before making the final edits on what has now turned into an annual short film.
“I honestly didn’t know that schedule release was like a creative Super Bowl for a lot of teams,” says Bretto, who joined the Chargers in 2018. “It’s gotten bigger.”
By now, the Chargers’ creative team should know where all the Easter eggs will be placed. Will there be a subtle jab of Aaron Rodgers holding the Pittsburgh Steelers hostage? Will the Chargers make another Taylor Swift reference for one of the two scenes involving the Kansas City Chiefs? Oftentimes, the jokes are not that obvious and plenty of times they veer into trolling territory—last season’s video included Cam Newton fighting, Russell Wilson using a moving truck, Sean Payton returning players at “Ball-Mart” and Harrison Butker in the kitchen. All of this contributes to why so many people look forward to the Chargers’ video … unless maybe you’re from an older generation that misses the schedule release being placed on an easy-to-read graphic without having to Google, “What is Naruto?” Just don’t bother asking what the theme will be because they won’t share the top secret until everyone finds out together Wednesday evening.
“People will ask me,” says Megan Julian, the Chargers’ senior director of digital and social media. “I definitely have been on Hinge [the dating app] and people are like, ‘What are y’all doing [for this year’s schedule video]?’ This is Hinge, bro. We gotta calm down. We gotta chill out. I’m not telling you.
“My mom would ask. [I’d say,] ‘I’d tell you, but you’re not even going to know what it is.’ My mom never gets anything that we do. … I want people to be surprised, but people, they do ask. They know I’m not going to tell you.”
The Chargers have earned a reputation for having the most creative schedule announcements, going back to their comedic “stock footage” in 2019 to their back-to-back anime-themed reveals in ’22 and ’23, which gained millions of views across all platforms and raised the level of competition for something that once could have easily been sent as an email. All the stressed out content creators across the league can point the finger at the Seattle Seahawks for starting the yearly competition in 2016 with their memorable cupcake schedule video.
“Sometimes it feels a little stupid that we’re talking about [Nintendo] 64 games while working for the NFL, like why are we doing that?” says Bretto, who admitted to having schedule release ideas floating in his mind year-round.
“It’s pretty much a year-round thing. If I see something on television, my mind goes, ‘How can that be used for schedule release?’”
Even after Julian hits publish on all the Chargers’ social platforms at 8 p.m. ET Wednesday to unleash the latest unique schedule video, the creative team won’t get to shake off the nerves, because how the public reacts is everything for something that was supposed to be more about planning purposes, not a competition. The countless hours the 32 teams put into the schedule release videos have led to this turning into a beauty pageant of sorts, with all eyes on what the Chargers will do to top last year’s Sims edition, based on the life simulation video game.
“You do all this prep work,” Bretto says. “It’s kind of like standing on the edge of a cliff and you’re about to jump off, you have a parachute, you have everything you need, you’ve prepped as much as you can, but you’re still at the edge of that cliff with your legs shaking. It’s nerve-wracking.”
“I would love to say that I stay away from [the comments],” Julian says. “Obviously, I look at it. Everyone in the office is looking at it and reading comments out loud. You just want that initial gut check, like, ‘Hey, do they like it?’”
Ironically, on a day filled with schedule leaks, the Chargers’ creative reputation might have developed a patient audience that would rather wait for the full schedule release video instead of what “source said” on X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter) about the date details for individual games. Then again, the majority of viewers the Chargers’ schedule video typically attracts don’t care much about the logistics and some never even know when the NFL plans to release all the schedules. Many aren’t even football fans.
The Chargers have converted anime enthusiasts, video game lovers and TikTokers who aren’t NFL diehards into fans of the team. Perhaps the creative team feels less stress knowing that their next audience—depending on the secretive schedule theme TBD—doesn’t have a single clue that about a dozen people have spent the past five months working tirelessly to point their attention toward a football team they don’t care about … yet.
“Not everyone is going to get it,” Julian says. “That’s O.K. It wasn’t meant for you. But we’re programmed to hit different audiences. Not all Chargers fans look the same. You want to go viral on different Reddit channels, not just the NFL’s Reddit; the Sims community, the anime community, the Raiders’ subreddit. That’s the goal, for a bunch of people to feel included or involved.”
The Chargers’ creative team, which includes senior production engineer Brian Georgeson, lead cinematographer Will Hahn, senior vice president of brand creative and content Jason Lavine, senior director of production Tyler Pino, and director of organic social media Allie Raymond, would rather not discuss their prestige because they know 31 other teams have prepared just as much with hopes of becoming the next unofficial champion of the schedule release. The Tennessee Titans’ 2023 schedule release video, in which the team asked non-football fans in Nashville to identify teams by their logos, was an instant classic. There was also 2019, when a handful of teams were inspired by Game of Thrones for their respective schedule videos.
Having the same theme, jokes not landing and negative reviews are just three of many concerns that keep NFL content creators up at night these days. For the Chargers, it’s the possibility of disappointing certain audiences for not delivering a second Sims video or anime Part III. (Again, unless they do. Only about 20 to 30 people inside the Chargers’ facility know the theme for this year’s video.)
Last year, Raymond worried that the public wouldn’t react well to the Sims idea because there was plenty of demand for a third anime edition, even though nearly everyone on the Chargers’ creative team immediately loved the idea of going with the video game. Two years before that, there was more stress among the group because there was doubt that Andrew Cordova, formerly the team’s feature producer and editor, could actually draw anime images.
“I’m going to need to see it,” Julian recalls telling Cordova. “That seems like a big stretch. ‘You can make an anime?’”
In 2019, Julian and Bretto wanted to do a last-minute pivot from the stock photos, which didn’t seem as funny the closer they got to the schedule release date. It has all worked out for the Chargers’ creative team, with many players, coaches and team executives across the league familiar with their work.
“Coming in, their reputation preceded them,” says Hortiz, who joined the Chargers last year after spending 26 years with the Baltimore Ravens. “When I came in, I had seen the schedule releases and I was a fan before I even got here. They get us out there year-round. We play 20 games, preseason, regular season. We’re in front of the fans then, but the rest of the year, they’re always putting great content out. They somehow manage to make me look good, which is difficult, so I love them for that.”
Bretto bounced the praise back to Hortiz, telling the GM that one of his TikTok videos gained two million views. For the video, Hortiz went back to his scouting roots, breaking down movie scenes of characters throwing the football around. Hortiz was in front of the camera a few days before the NFL draft, signifying how high making content for the social team ranks on the priority list during the busiest week of the year.
“I’m viral?” Hortiz jokingly asks. “I’m viral. That’s the only time someone has said I’m viral. … We’ll compare boards after we’re done.”
No pressure, Chargers creatives. All they have to do is gain millions of eyeballs for Wednesday’s schedule release, and in a week, they’ll be thinking about the next idea for 2026. Perhaps they can go back to the days of releasing straightforward schedules.
“I talk with other social media teams,” Julian says. “We joke, ‘What if we all didn’t do it, like what would happen?’”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as How Schedule Release Day Became the NFL’s Creative Super Bowl.