Aaron Rodriguez

January 27,2021

Account Breakdown #1

Cohort 21S

            Over the past year the Instagram of the Los Angeles Chargers have posted about various topics centered around holidays, retirements, racial inequity and the COVID-19 pandemic. On New Year’s Day the Chargers posted an animation with their players to celebrate the New Year. Their followers were quick to realize that Phillip Rivers and Melvin Gordon weren’t in the animation. They soon would speculate that they would not be on the team anymore. As the month went on there was some posts about them getting to work and are striving to be a better team while hyping up the team through videos and promoted filters of their “What charger are you filter”. On January 14 they announced Antonio Gates’ retirement with a video to recap his career and later that day they posted a video of Phillip Rivers talking about his relationship with Gates. This was followed with a meme of Gates being the GOAT followed by a meme of Rivers previous video then posted other players reaction to the retirement. Their followers reacted in loving support of Gates through all the posts and thanked him and the same posts continued to the next day. On February 6 an announcement of Eric Weddle’s retirement was posted, and the comments were split between people saying that he was a great Charger, he had bad things to say about the organization and that the organization did not treat him well. This announcement wasn’t covered that long as a post about Phillip Rivers leaving the team was announced. The comments were to wish him the best of luck at his new team and thank him for everything. On February 14 a post about Valentines Day was posted with a card and Photoshoped players on it. They highlighted their partnership with PF Chang’s as it was the anniversary of their partnership. They made a video with romantic scenes from movies and posted the logos of PF Chang’s and the Chargers over their faces. The comments were very positive about this post as people praised the media team.

            As the pandemic began the tone changed to focus on issues because of the pandemic. Linval Joseph had a meme about people hoarding toilet paper followed by a message to stay safe from Derwin James. Home workout videos were posted a few days later and people were interested in finding more workout videos and this continued through the month with an announcement of the new uniforms on March 24^th. The fans were very excited and wanted to know where they could get the jerseys. They continued to post about what they are doing while quarantining until late August where they focused on the shooting of Jacob Blake where they showed clips of the press conference of Letera Widman and a few days later Tyrod Taylor spoke about his experience with being black when he leaves the stadium. The comments from their followers were mostly negative. They were tired of the politics in sports and argued that the media had a false narrative about the situation. Some people say that they loved the stand that they were taking but to the initial posts most comments were negative, and that the media was creating false narratives and that he was a criminal. Their fans continued to state they should support Breonna Taylor instead. Taylors’ and Lynn’s posts had positive comments.