The NFL’s annual schedule release has become a marquee event for team creatives, with many schedule reveal videos being planned months in advance.
And while teams like the Chargers, Jets, and Raiders have racked up millions of views for their elaborate schedule releases on Thursday, including the likes of Halo gameplay and a Kirk Cousins-Fernando Mendoza photoshoot, the Cardinals are being criticized for seemingly using AI in their own video.
Arizona’s three-minute schedule release video consists of a virtual call with NFL mascots, being addressed by a “Director of Mascot Matchups.” As the video plays, mascots of the Cardinals’ opponents get highlighted, as the director speaks in a voice that gets drowned in and out through the clip.
Towards the end of the video, it is revealed that the Cardinals’ mascot was filmed through a green screen and used as a template for other mascots to follow.
The video, which has 934 likes and 656 comments on X, has several comments calling it AI generated. One user posted a GIF saying “Your AI slop bores me,” which garnered over four times the amount of likes as the original schedule release.
“We did not use AI to create our schedule release video,” a Chargers spokesperson told Front Office Sports. The Chargers have long been on the cutting edge of NFL social media and their Halo-themed schedule video has 95,000 likes on X and 83,000 on Instagram as of publication time.
Meanwhile, several other teams have specifically mentioned that their videos don’t use AI. The Packers, who said they made a schedule release consisting of a hand-made set and models, posted on Friday: “Your AI slop bores us.” Meanwhile, the Raiders posted “proof” that their release wasn’t made with AI, while the Jaguars wrote “AI could never” to caption a post of Trevor Lawrence’s haircut.
In 2025, the Bills’ schedule video featured NBA legend Allen Iverson as a play on the video being “made with AI.” On Monday, the Saints posted about how they “will never use AI” for graphics.
The Cardinals, Packers, Raiders, Jaguars, Bills, and Saints did not immediately respond to requests for comment at the time of this article’s publication.
AI usage has become a widespread topic in the sports creative industry, as more and more major sports teams are denouncing AI publicly—but also quietly using it. Several graphic designers who spoke with FOS recently believe their human abilities won’t be replaced by AI, but are concerned that teams and administrators may not feel the same way.
