Every NFL fan looks forward to two days: the Super Bowl and the annual NFL schedule release. Most of a team’s schedule is predetermined years in advance, but football-deprived fans still look forward to this day every year.
The tradition began in 2016 when the Seattle Seahawks released the first NFL schedule release video. It received 84 comments, 846 retweets, and 1,700 likes. Not much for an NFL team with 1.45 million followers at the time; however, people loved the concept, and thus a tradition began for both fans and social media managers.
Figure 1: Seahawks Original Schedule Release (April 14, 2016); Facebook
What started as one small video quickly ballooned into the social media celebration that we know and love. Teams have recreated famous movie scenes, hit shows, and even gone straight to their fans with street interviews for their schedule releases.
The 2021 Chargers schedule release video was a simple slideshow presentation of Joey Bosa announcing the schedule. It was a rather slow week for the Chargers' schedule being mentioned on social media as the previous 3 days averaged only 62 mentions per day across all major social media platforms. Joey Bosa’s schedule release video created a 1,445.56% post volume increase from the previous day's mentions. It was also matched with 97% positive sentiment.
Figure 2: Los Angeles Chargers 2021 schedule release post (May 12, 2021); Twitter/X
Total success, but not a defining moment for a brand's social media legacy.
The scene was perfectly set for the Chargers with anime’s popularity rapidly building during the long at-home periods of the COVID pandemic. The monthly post volume for anime on all major social media platforms ranged between 19M to 37M from January 2019 to July 2020. There was suddenly a massive upswing in post volume in August 2020 with 103M posts– and this happened overnight. This shift in anime popularity was volatile, but steady until December 2021, when there were 161M posts. The trend line was hiding in plain sight for the brand that could properly pull it off.
Figure 3: Anime conversations (January 1, 2019 - January 1, 2023); Infegy Social Dataset
Two worlds collided on May 12, 2022 when the Chargers posted their anime-themed schedule release for NFL and anime fans to enjoy. It was a brand-defining moment with the Charger’s schedule release being mentioned 110,406 times on all major social media platforms in just two days. For comparison, “NFL schedule releases” was only mentioned 6,290 times. The Charger’s video was 1,655.26% bigger than the NFL’s big day. For comparison, other “popular” schedule releases included the Cowboys collaboration video with Stephen A. Smith that had 748 mentions, or Tennessee Titans interviewing their fans and returning with 115 mentions.
The Chargers rode a trend so well that it was not only everywhere, but had 98% positivity on May 12th and 97% positivity on May 13th. Years later, it sits at 1.1M views on YouTube. On X/Twitter it has 200k likes, 37k retweets, 5000 comments, and 7k bookmarks.
The people loved the video poking fun at their opponents for the year. Those 2 minutes of authentic fun are how the Chargers became everybody’s favorite team for the NFL Schedule Release.
As previously mentioned, the people loved the 2022 Chargers release so much that every sequel has been animated and focused on a different game. 2023 saw a repeat anime release (83,126 mentions in 2 days), 2024 was themed after The Sims (77,603 mentions in 2 days), 2025 was Minecraft and 2026? The legendary Halo (66,316 mentions in 2 days).
The California-based team probably won’t ever win a Super Bowl, but they definitely won social media.