The original Griffining.com gallery collected an extraordinary burst of fan creativity in 2012. While we work to recover its original WordPress uploads, contemporary news coverage still provides a dated, independently verifiable trail of early fan photographs. This guide identifies where that evidence survives—and makes a crucial distinction: a photo documented by a newspaper in 2012 was not necessarily submitted to Griffining.com.
September 10: fan photos are already circulating
On September 10, 2012, Josh Katzowitz at CBS Sports showed several examples just one day after RG3’s touchdown celebration. The report credited Burgundy Blog with helping launch the trend and identified these fan-submitted scenes:
- A photograph captioned “Griffining in front of the Griffin”, credited by CBS to @AmBAM-iJAM.
- “Indoctrinating the youth”, credited by CBS to @louventuri.
- “Griffining after BBQing”, credited by CBS to @GoodOlJohnnyK.
These are documented 2012 examples, but we have not established whether any appeared in the original Griffining.com galleries. The photos remain at the publishing news outlet while we check provenance and rights.
September 10–11: the @Griffining account documents the craze
The NFL’s September 11 article preserved text from several original @Griffining posts. These linked to fan images of:
- Someone recreating the pose at an airport (September 10).
- An entire kindergarten class recreating the pose (September 10).
- A scene on Baylor University’s campus (September 11).
- A playful side-by-side reference to “Romoing” (September 10).
The early social posts are a valuable lead for recovering image sources, but embedded images may no longer load. In particular, we are not republishing images depicting minors without reviewing their provenance and appropriate permissions.
September 30–October 1: RG3 recreates his own meme
A September 30 Washington Post report documented Griffin posing alongside Olympic hurdler Kellie Wells after a victory in Tampa Bay. Larry Brown Sports followed on October 1 with the photograph and discussion. That image is a confirmed contemporary Griffining example; it is not yet verified as an original Griffining.com upload.
October 21: the pose survives into the season
The Washington Post’s October 21 account revisited Griffining after another touchdown against the Giants. It also described the meme appearing in merchandise, tattoos and a televised segment involving the Lincoln Memorial. That range of examples shows how much of the phenomenon survives outside the original fan-gallery website.
What the restored gallery will—and won’t—claim
For each historical image we recover, we aim to keep the original image URL, posting date, caption, credited contributor, and a link to its source. We will not relabel news photos or later recreations as original Griffining.com submissions without independent evidence. If the source photograph is unavailable or reuse is uncertain, we’ll preserve an attributed text record and link to the original reporting instead.
See our restoration methodology, browse the original photo gallery, or consult the 2012 press archive for more contemporary sources.