Isaac Rochelle in a Raiders.com video feature, posted hours before they cut him. Isaac Rochelle in a Raiders.com video feature, posted hours before they cut him. (Raiders.com.)
By Andrew Bucholtz on

Team social media accounts and team personnel departments often aren’t quite on the same page. And that sometimes leads to awkward posts honoring a player who either was just cut or traded or winds up in one of those categories soon after. The latest case of that is from the Las Vegas Raiders, who posted a video and article on Rochelle honoring his brother’s military career (which included playing at Air Force) Tuesday at 2:19 p.m. Eastern:

Three and a half hours later, they posted about waiving Rochelle:

Rochelle noted the awkwardness there even before the Raiders’ official announcement of his release:

This might be awkward for some fans, too, as Rochelle was a favorite of many:

Here’s more from the Raiders.com feature on him that was posted Tuesday, by Levi Edwards:

“Seeing him go to Air Force, going through all the things like basic training and their survival training, people don’t even know about that,” Isaac said, describing his older brother’s early military experience. “They had to go a week pretty much with no food. You just have a new level of respect.

“It kind of puts things in perspective. Like for him, he got to school, he had his phone taken away, [went] straight into basic training. So, for me seeing that, it kind of makes you take a step back. … They’re still in school, still playing football, but like I mentioned basic training, survival training, not having your phone when you’re 18, just getting to college. Those are all things that build calluses and make you a little bit tougher.”

This is far from the first case of team social media accounts doing something awkward (or worse) for the team. We see this a lot with happy birthday posts right before a player gets cut, for example, including two this summer. But it is quite a remarkable one, especially with this also including a full video and written feature.

Granted, there isn’t necessarily an easy way to avoid awkward posts about soon-to-be ex-players. In this particular situation, it’s quite possible the Raiders hadn’t even made the decision to cut Rochelle when they tweeted the video on him. His cut came hours later after they picked up another player and needed roster space. And even if their personnel staff had made that decision, or even had decided that he was a candidate to potentially drop, they might not want to have that widely-known in the organization to both prevent leaks and prevent awkwardness if that didn’t wind up happening.

There’s no obvious way to avoid this other than “Have the social and digital media team regularly run their planned schedule of players to feature by football ops.” But that comes with the perils of leaks or awkwardness if the ops department says “No, don’t feature that guy.” So it’s somewhat understandable why teams sometimes wind up posting content about players who shortly afterward aren’t there. (And this one’s more defensible than the birthday cuts…you could seemingly simply cut players on a day other than their birthday, which is known information that causes no potential leaks.) But it is still always interesting to see this.

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

View all posts by Andrew Bucholtz