Who's No. 1? Colts take themselves out of the running for best schedule-release videos
Some make us laugh.
Some make us scratch our heads in bewilderment.
Some make us feel good about ourselves for picking up on a timely pop culture reference that only the most hip members of our society would recognize and that may be irrelevant in weeks.
All of them, however, make us ready for some football ... in about four months.
In what has become a yearly tradition in the social media age, all 32 NFL teams released videos Wednesday to help reveal their schedules for the upcoming season.
And one team took it back just hours after it was released. The Indianapolis Colts' video seemingly poked fun at Dolphins receiver Tyreek Hill's run-in with the law. The video featured a dolphin swimming while wearing Hill's No. 10, drawing a siren from a Coast Guard boat helmed by an officer crossing his arms with a look of disapproval.
The Colts said in a statement that the Minecraft-inspired production 'exceeded our rights with Microsoft and included an insensitive clip involving Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill. We sincerely apologize to Microsoft and Tyreek.'
Hill responded in good humor on X: 'Should've left it up @Colts , this was funny,' with a shrug emoji.
Getting more creative and quirky by the year, these videos aim to entertain as much as inform. Clearly, they don't just exist to provide the dates and times for a particular team's 17-game schedule. Sometimes, the schedules seem to be afterthoughts.
While some are short and to the point (thanks, Texans and Dolphins), many others require a decent chunk of the viewers' time (nearly 11 minutes of former head coach Jon Gruden — really, Buccaneers?).
To help sort through it, below is an extremely subjective list of this year's top five best schedule-release videos. In the interest of preventing any kind of home-field advantage, the Rams and Chargers were excluded from consideration. Both are worth checking out:
Also, some honorable mentions worth checking out include the Arizona Cardinals, Atlanta Falcons, Tennessee Titans and Cincinnati Bengals.
On to the top five ...
5. Buffalo Bills
This is nothing fancy, and that's what makes it brilliant. A miscommunication between general manager Brandon Beane and quarterback Josh Allen leads Beane to enlist NBA legend Allen Iverson for the Bills' schedule-release video. A confused A.I. eventually holds up a paper copy of the schedule for just 3 seconds.
4. Las Vegas Raiders
An homage to the old-school 'This is SportsCenter' commercials on ESPN, this one comes in at nearly 7 minutes long — but it needs all that time to squeeze in the Easter eggs, current and past Raiders, celebrity cameos, subtle trash talk (Penn & Teller really nail the Chiefs), inside jokes, live animals, cultural references and more. It even has a blooper reel at the end.
3. Denver Broncos
While the Broncos may never top their spoof of 'The Office' from a few years back, this one is pretty great too. For reasons that aren't particularly clear (or important), the video is set at a rodeo that features children representing the Broncos' opponents, trying (and failing) to ride sheep. The real star is the announcer, who provides brutal commentary ('Duval? More like 'Do Fall' for the Jaguars) for each failure.
2. New York Giants
In this spoof of a reality TV commercial, the Giants present their 2025 opponents as the fake show's cast members. The Chiefs are represented by a woman who speaks about her new hairstyle ('I was due for a blowout,' a reference to the team's lopsided Super Bowl loss) and her love for zebras (a reference to the perception that NFL referees show preference to the Chiefs). The Chargers are depicted as an air-headed surfer dude ('I like to keep my feet in the clouds and my head in the sand. Wait, I think I got that backwards.')
1. Seattle Seahawks
A perfectly executed send-up of the loud, hyper, over-the-top TV ads that have driven generations of kiddos to beg their parents to purchase hunks of plastic shaped like muscular heroes and ferocious monsters. What child (or, let's be real, adult toy collector) wouldn't want a Devon Witherspoon, Marshawn Lynch or Steve Largent action figure with weapons that include 'a functioning flame thrower' and a 'football finale missile ray'? 'All figures and playsets sold separately,' the team's X account states. 'Also none of this is real.' That's a shame.
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