By May 2013, Griffining had been around for more than eight months. The distinctive seated celebration inspired by Robert Griffin III’s September 9, 2012 touchdown had long since escaped its first news cycle. Contemporary coverage from that spring shows the idea being adapted, while the surviving Griffining.com archive shows fans still submitting versions of the original pose.
May 21: a Griffining-inspired wedding-gift joke
On May 21, 2013, Dan Steinberg of The Washington Post published “The new Griffining: posing in front of wedding gifts.” The piece described a reader submission from @B_Maz: a couple posed with gifts from their wedding registry, playfully referencing the attention surrounding RG3’s own wedding-registry gifts. Steinberg framed the photo as a joking new spin on an older internet pose, not a claim that the original celebration had acquired an official successor.
That distinction matters for an archive. This Washington Post image is contemporary coverage of a different submission; we are not presenting it as an original Griffining.com upload or adding the newspaper’s photograph to the restored fan gallery.
May 28: original-style Griffining photos remained on the site
One week later, the original Griffining.com site recorded two submissions that survive in the owner’s restored collection. On May 28, 2013, a photo credited to @MVMJR showed Griffining on a boat in Washington, D.C. Another entry credited to @BenBlu93 was captioned “Griffining on the prairie in Kansas.” Both photographs have been restored as separate entries, with the original posting date and caption transcribed from the owner’s recording of the 2013 archive.
Those photos do not prove anything about the number of people still participating, and they do not establish a final date for the trend. They do show that the original Griffining.com archive continued documenting the recognizable pose into late May 2013 even as the press played with other meanings of “Griffining.”
How the evidence fits together
The Washington Post story is an independent, dated press source. The two restored images are owner-supplied files matched to the original site’s historical submission inventory. For additional context, browse the dated fan-photo timeline, the full restored gallery, and the 2012 press archive. The owner-supplied recording of the September 11, 2013 Wayback capture remains the source for the old Griffining.com post dates.