INDIANAPOLIS — The Colts did not put the finishing touches on the best schedule release video they have ever assembled until the last minute.
They couldn’t.
Under the leadership of Amber Derrow, the team’s senior director of content strategy and operations, the Colts painstakingly spent more than a year on a partnership with “The Simpsons,” putting together a schedule release video so good that it almost erased the memory of the team’s disastrous effort in 2025.
But the Colts did not know they’d be playing the Commanders in London until 5 p.m. last Tuesday, less than 24 hours before the international game was announced and a little more than two days before “The Simpsons” video went public.
Derrow fired off an email to Matt Selman, one of the show’s lead animators, writers and producers, to ask if they could change the clip they’d picked for the Commanders, swapping it out for a video of Homer getting beaten by Buckingham Palace soldiers at the Changing of the King’s Guard.
“Any chance?” Derrow wrote. “Hypothetically. …”
No problem.
“That was literally a last-second swap,” Derrow said. “It just showed how nimble they were. They wanted this to be just as good as the product, as it could be. They were more than willing to work until the last minute to nail this.”
Colts innovated by turning the jokes on themselves
For reasons known only to the Internet, the NFL schedule release has become the Super Bowl for NFL team’s content departments, a chance to flex their creative muscle by putting together something funny, memorable and, most importantly, viral.
The Colts went viral for all the wrong reasons in 2025. Indianapolis released a Minecraft-inspired parody, only to delete the video roughly an hour later because of multiple missteps, and the Internet pounced, firing off both jokes and serious criticisms of the team’s effort.
If the Colts had played it safe in 2026, it would have been understandable.
Except Derrow had already put the wheels in motion to turn it around.
The Colts initially reached out to Selman about “The Simpsons” more than a year ago, planning to use “historical clips” — actual footage of “The Simpsons that matched each opponent on the schedule — for a video.”
“When we had pulled our own clips for last year’s schedule, I think that’s what really caught his eye, because it wasn’t just, ‘Hey, we want to use your name and likeness,’” Derrow said. “It was, ‘Hey, we’re really big fans, and we want to make sure people know just how funny and good ‘The Simpsons’ are.”
There wasn’t enough time to finish the video for 2025.
Instead, the Colts misfired with Minecraft but the mistakes the team made in 2025 ended up shaping “The Simpsons” triumph.
For starters, the rights. When Indianapolis issued an apology for its 2025 video, one of the reasons the team cited was “it exceeded our rights with Microsoft.”
The Colts weren’t about to make that mistake again.
“We learned from last year, we made sure it was a top priority for us that we got that figured out very early on in the process,” Derrow said. “It’s still crazy that they were so interested in it, and that’s the thing with this project — you’ve got ‘The Simpsons,’ you’ve got the showrunners, you’ve got the animators, but then you’ve got Disney, and you’ve got Disney Plus.”
The rights do not stop there. Not only did the Colts have to get rights for the show through all the platforms where it’s offered, the team had to get rights for individual voices. Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer, allowed the team to use his voice; there were other voices where the rights weren’t available, and ‘The Simpsons’-Colts team came up with creative ways to work around that.
“To have the buy-in, have it written, locked in, a huge moment for me,” Derrow said.
The Colts also apologized in 2025 for “an insensitive clip involving Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill,” a clip that involved Hill getting arrested by the Coast Guard, a joke Hill later said he found funny.
Indianapolis still decided to alter its approach in 2026. For years, the Chargers have been the NFL’s gold standard on schedule release videos, both because of their originality and because they have developed a reputation for coming up with biting jokes about their opponents, jokes that often toe the line of appropriateness perfectly.
When the Colts released their video in 2025, they tried to do the same thing, a mistake that both led to the Hill apology and criticism that it tried to copy the Chargers, who also used Minecraft in 2025.
“We tried to kind of do that last year, where you kind of poke fun at others — because that’s kind of what the schedule release has become — and it’s just not on-brand for us,” Derrow said. “We have always considered ourselves the Midwest good guys.”
By trying to stay true to themselves, the Colts came up with an innovation entirely their own in 2026. The Chargers have cornered the market on snark. Tennessee struck gold with a “man on the street” video a couple of years ago, and the Titans went back to that well in 2026.
Indianapolis innovated by turning the jokes on themselves.
Early in the intro, there was a “Tire Fire: AKA the Colts Schedule Release Video,” right next to the “Franchise Tag Nuclear Option Power Plant,” a reference to the team’s decision to place a tag on quarterback Daniel Jones. A sign in Homer’s workplace saying “4,252 days without a win in Jacksonville,” followed by the famous GIF of Homer slinking back into the bushes for the road trip to Jacksonville during the actual dates of the schedule.
The self-deprecating nods were universally praised by social media.
“Own who you are, be who you are,” Derrow said. “You’re going to have so much more success that way.”
When Bart’s writing on the chalkboard in the altered introduction, he’s writing “We Will Not Include Tyreek Hill in These Videos.”
The Colts cleared that joke at themselves with Hill first.
Working with ‘The Simpsons’ was a blast
The rights were the hard part.
Writing the script and working with ‘The Simpsons’ was a blast, the kind of experience that’s going to stick with Colts employees for a long, long time.
Derrow had started watching ‘The Simpsons’ about midway through the show’s run and considered herself a casual fan, but the show has so much reach that she had plenty of help.
JJ Stankevitz, the team’s senior manager of editorial and audio, and vice president of football communications Matt Conti are diehard fans of the show, capable of pulling out a quote for almost any situation, and the two fired ideas at Derrow for every game on the schedule, plus the intro written and animated by “The Simpsons” creators.
Armed with three or four ideas for every game on the schedule, Derrow then watched the episodes themselves to find the right one.
“I would say I was a casual fan, and then you sit around at work and you get exposed to these avid fans who can reference and quote these episodes by memory,” Derrow said. “Now, I’m diehard. I’ve watched basically every episode that exists. My Disney Plus account thinks I only enjoy adult animation, but it’s been a lot of fun, and my love for the show has only grown.”
The creators at “The Simpsons” came up with a few of their own ideas. For example, a sign in the intro for Krusty Burger that read “Our fries cooked in delicious Lucas Oil” came from the writers themselves.
And Derrow got a glimpse into the genius that goes into every episode.
For a scene where Homer walks into his living room to see the Colts offensive line sitting there, the animators needed the height and weight of every lineman in order to get their dimensions right and figure out how many big men would fit on the couch. Four offensive linemen ended up making the clip, including left tackle Bernhard Raimann, who was taped his line, “Who’s the skinny guy?” during the offseason.
There was plenty more. The team recorded its touchdown song — “Maria (I Like It Loud)” by the German artist, Scooter — on a saxophone, then put it in the iconic band scene, Lisa playing the song as she leaves the room.
The 4,252 days since the win in Jacksonville?
They checked. That was the exact number.
“That’s how good the Simpsons were about nailing these Easter Eggs and making them as authentic as possible,” Derrow said. “I did joke that we should have put some type of prediction in there.”
If somebody wants to go back and watch 800-plus episodes of “The Simpsons,” the way Derrow did over the last year and a half, they’ll find a lot of things the show seemingly predicted, something diehard fans of the show already know.
A prediction that ended up coming true could make “The Simpsons” video the greatest schedule release of all time.
The final joke was a close second.
“Our all-time favorite clip, and I cannot believe that everybody was on board with including it, was Florida being America’s wang,” Derrow said. “Credit to Matt Selman and that crew, that was one of the first conversations we had, Selman goes, ‘How do we get America’s wang in there?’ and I was like ‘I’ll try.’”
Indianapolis plays Jacksonville in the season finale.
From Florida.
Jim Irsay Easter egg
Derrow’s favorite Easter egg was a picture of Jim Irsay.
Irsay was in a picture, hung on the wall in the classroom with Bart writing on the chalkboard, wearing his Super Bowl ring. When Derrow pitched the idea to the team’s new ownership, she found out an Easter Egg of her own.
“That was one of the few cartoons they all watched together,” Derrow said of the Irsay family.
When the video was complete, she printed the Easter Egg of their father in the chalkboard scene and put it in a lavender frame for the Irsay daughters, a keepsake of an incredible moment for the team’s content department.
But there was one other comment that Derrow saw that convinced her the Colts had put the embarrassment of 2025 away by turning out arguably the best video any team produced in 2026.
“There was a response on Twitter that I saw where somebody said, ‘It’s like Colts fans wrote this,’” Derrow said. “That was what I wanted.”
A year’s worth of work, all coming together in three and a half minutes.
No reason to take this one down.
Joel A. Erickson and Nathan Brown cover the Colts all season. Get more coverage on IndyStarTV and with the Colts Insider newsletter.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Inside the making of the Colts’ smash ‘The Simpsons’ schedule video
Reporting by Joel A. Erickson, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
