Why should we even bother talking about them?
The stakes have become bigger and bigger when it comes to the realm of social media and NFL teams’ release videos. I have to admit that I’m of two minds when it comes to them. First off, a quick definition for those who haven’t seen them: they are videos created by each NFL team that are set for release the day that the NFL schedules are announced. They range in length from 1-10 minutes, and are a kind of hype video for the team and the schedule, and to get fans thinking about the NFL during the offseason. And if we’re being honest, the NFL has done its best to try to get into news coverage pretty much all of the time. One can wonder why teams feel the need to release these videos, but here we are. And the teams have become increasingly competitive when it comes to these videos.
Some of these release videos can be very funny — The Tennessee Titans and Los Angeles Chargers seem to have mastered the genre pretty well, and the Atlanta Falcons aren’t too far behind. Some are just plain weird (2025 Minnesota Vikings: what’s up with the tattoos you encouraged fans to get to be a part of your video?). Some are just not funny. But I see them as one of the ways that teams are trying to encourage casual and hard core fans to boost the conversation surrounding their teams.
There is one part of me that does have a great concern about these videos: I’m not sure that any of them really cared about accessibility. As an exercise in captioning, I’m not even sure how I would do it without spoiling all of the different nuances found in the videos.And the captions themselves would last longer than the segment of the video. I could certainly imagine the readout in a screen reader lasting longer than the actual video, even if one sets up their screen reader to read output at double speed.[1]I know of blind users who do this. They are really good at using screen readers. WCAG 2.1 suggests that the text should appear on the page. I think I’d probably create a separate transcript page and link to that, because otherwise, the page itself would be too dense. The 2025 Los Angeles Chargers video would be a perfect example of what I’m thinking about. There are so many Easter eggs that even those of us who are sighted users have to watch and rewatch the videos in order to capture every little nuance. Just in the Minnesota Vikings part of the video, the Easter eggs include the spoonbridge and cherry statue from the Walker Museum of Art, what appears to the the Buffalo Tap & Grill in Savage, Minnesota[2]I’m not totally sure about this one. But they do serve Juicy Lucy’s., the Viking ship, a banner commemorating the Minnesota Wild’s 8 times making the playoffs but failing to get out of the first round, the “Best Wild Card record in 2024” banner, and Sam Darnold coming in with a Vikings uniform and leaving with a Seattle Seahawks uniform, along with a wall poster that says “Dance Lessons” and “See you in two weeks,” a reference to a conversation between the Lions’ head coach and the Vikings’ head coach. And my description didn’t even talk about the fonts used to describe each of these different parts of the video (some are Gothic, and parts of the video are in Minecraft Seven/Mojangles. And with 17 different football games on the schedul, that means a page describing the 2025 Chargers video could easily encompass over 100 different Easter eggs. I think I’d probably put a “spoiler alert” heading, followed by a list of the different parts of the video. That might make for 20 different links (the intro could be a page, and so could the bye week).
I suspect the sports rhetoric course I plan on offering someday may include a short segment on these videos to point out how football has managed to use a basic item — the release of their schedules — as another way to garner attention. The Southeastern Conference in college has done the same thing pretty effectively. But it’s also a place to discuss accessibility. With NFL ratings down slightly in 2024, why wouldn’t NFL teams try to get more people tuning in? The NFL might actually listen; after all, they did learn from their 2015 Jets-Patriots fiasco.