Not too many people predicted the Bills winning the Super Bowl 50.
Missing the crucial element for success—a franchise quarterback—Buffalo was coming off of an 8-8 campaign, the franchise’s 16th consecutive season without a playoff appearance. A $100 bet on a Bills winning it all in September would have cashed you $6,000.
The Bills did not win Super Bowl 50. They are 0-4 in the big game. But for Buffalo native and proud #BillsMafia member Jon Rinaldo, who goes to a few Bills games a year, memories of a championship that never was will literally always be with him. He got a Bills logo tattooed on his chest that reads “Super Bowl champions, 2016-17,” while he was living in Hawaii and working as a busboy and a dishwasher.
Rinaldo said that the tattoo was not intended to be a prediction. Rather, he got it in an attempt to inspire the team and its fans to rally together and win it all that year. Rinaldo felt compelled to try to help his team after watching the ESPN documentary “Four Falls of Buffalo,” which details the early-90s Bills teams. He called watching the documentary “the most emotional experience” of his life.
“It was just kind of like so players would see it, fans would see it and get more excited,” Rinaldo said of his tattoo. “I did it because I love the team.”
I believe #billsmafia pic.twitter.com/nakJrT5sed
The tattoo quickly went viral; Rinaldo got almost 1,000 retweets on that picture, and former Bills center Eric Wood even gave him a shoutout.
Tattoos like Rinaldo’s have become increasingly common sights on social media—especially during playoff time. It seems as though every year, we’re treated to someone celebrating their team’s championship prematurely.
This year, Jaguars and Patriots fans showed off their celebratory tattoos too early. We’ve seen Mets and Indians fans get these sorts of tats in 2015 and 2016, respectively. Even NBA vet Jason Terry got a tattoo like this, when he predicted a Celtics championship in a big way on his bicep in 2013. Even pro athletes can be hilariously wrong.
These tattoos always seem to garner serious attention on the timeline. It’s not entirely clear when or where these started, but it appears as though the earliest one to go viral was some Texas Rangers ink in 2011. There is also a Detroit Lions Super Bowl tattoo dated 2005, although it’s unclear when this picture started circulating. Since then, dozens of these tattoos have gone viral, each time setting the internet ablaze with equal measures of laughter and ridicule directed toward the sorry tattoo recipients.
While some of these tattoos do pan out (like they did for this Eagles fan and this Cubs fan) the vast majority do not age well. Cowboys fan and Florida native Jordan Garnett had so much confidence in his team that in December 2016, he got a tattoo celebrating a Cowboys Super Bowl LI championships—before the playoffs even started.
Garnett wasn’t much of a “tattoo guy” before this tattoo; it was just the second one he had ever gotten. The first was of Prince’s “Love Symbol No. 2,” which he got when he was 18. He decided to go through with the tattoo after a friend of his dad’s—a Giants fan—offered to pay for it. His confidence in the Cowboys was through the roof.
“The tattoo helped me get booked at places that would never have looked at me before. So it actually helped me. I don’t regret it at all, to be honest.” — JORDAN GARNETT
“I thought Dak [Prescott] and Zeke [Elliott] would take us all the way,” Garnett said. “I got it in December that year and I was so sure… I just thought the team had something special going on. We were just winning games. It didn’t matter if we were dominating or just getting lucky, I thought it was our year.”
Garnett’s tattoo soon became a viral sensation. The picture Garnett tweeted out received over 2,000 retweets, and was widely covered by several media outlets. In just a matter of days, Garnett would become somewhat of a minor celebrity.
“By the time I woke up the next morning I had thousands of retweets,” Garnett said. “A couple of days go by I’m on the news, I’m on local radio stations. Then, a couple more days go by, I’m on nationwide radio stations. It just went crazy, man.”
The Cowboys finished that season with a 13-3 record, only to have their championship hopes dashed by a late-game Aaron Rodgers comeback in the divisional round. Rodgers’ heroics left Garnett distraught—but not because of the tattoo.
“I think the tattoo was just some fun,” Garnett said. “I never thought it would get the publicity it got. But [when the Cowboys lost] I cried my eyes out. Because I really thought that was our year.”
Since that season, Garnett added an extra Roman numeral “I” to the Super Bowl, meaning it now reflects the game the Eagles won — adding insult to injury for a Cowboys diehard. Garnett said that he doesn’t know whether he will update the tattoo again, but that he is trying to distance himself from the tattoo. As a stand-up comedian, he doesn’t want to be solely known as “Cowboys tattoo guy” for the rest of his performing career.
Maybe prematurely celebrating a championship with a permanent tattoo isn’t such a smart move—especially if you root for a team with a losing history. But even if it is a dumb move, Nationals fan Pete Johnson went about it as smartly as possible. He inked a tattoo on his foot, which reads “Nationals, World Series Champs 2015.” It’s easy to hide.
Getting this tattoo was a total spur-of-the-moment thing; he didn’t do it in any sort of predictive manner. He did it just to do it.
“Going in, I very much knew it was a stupid idea, and it definitely turned out to be the case that it was,” Johnson said.
The Nationals missed the playoffs in 2015, as they imploded in the second-half of the season. Johnson attended all three Nats games in a series against the Mets that September, where Washington needed to win to keep their playoff hopes alive.
The Nats were swept, killing Johnson’s tattoo aspirations live and in person.
“I went to every game kind of thinking ‘this is my last hurrah for my tattoo,” Johnson said.
While the viral attention these tattoos get goes away in a matter of days, the tattoos themselves persist for a lifetime. Some come with regret, others come with a sense of satisfaction.
“When I’m with my family, or at a beach with my family sometimes I regret it,” Rinaldo said. “But other than that, not really.” — JON RINDALDO
Rinaldo said his Bills tattoo can be embarrassing in family settings. But when he’s with Bills Mafia, he shows it off with pride.
“When I’m with my family, or at a beach with my family sometimes I regret it,” Rinaldo said. “But other than that, not really.”
Garnett doesn’t regret his Cowboys tattoo one bit. As a stand-up comedian, the tattoo helped him cultivate a solid social media following, which he said has helped his career.
“The tattoo helped me get booked at places that would never have looked at me before,” Garnett said. “So it actually helped me. I don’t regret it at all, to be honest.”
And Johnson will never regret his Nationals tattoo, since it partially helped him meet his wife. He went out with some friends shortly after his Nats tat received its viral attention, and discussed his 15 minutes of fame with a woman who he met that night.
“We met for the first time, and we had a good time,” Johnson said. “I talked about the tattoo a lot, everyone was very excited about how stupid it was and the coverage was really funny.”
The two re-connected over a year later to arrange their first date—a Nats game. They tied the knot last October.
So although the images of these tattoos look ridiculous over Twitter, they sometimes still bring happy endings—even if their predictions prove wrong.
