Bradying

About

Bradying is a photo fad that involves taking pictures of oneself sitting on the floor with the head lowered and hands clasped between the legs. The pose was inspired by a photograph of NFL player Tom Brady on the football field following his team’s loss against the New York Giants at the Super Bowl XLVI.

Origin

The photograph of Tom Brady sitting resignedly on the field was taken by AP photographer Paul Sancya shortly after the New York Giants’ linebacker Chase Blackburn intercepted his pass during the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl game on February 5th, 2012.

The pose was first coined “Bradying” on the entertainment portal site Boxden by user pabloescobarjr in a post titled “Bradying going to be the new Tebowing?”^[1] on February 7th. The post showcased an image compilation of people imitating Brady’s pose in an office along with the hashtag #Bradying.

Spread

Similar to the development of other flash-in-the-pan photo fads, the singel topic Tumblr for Bradying^[2] and a Facebook page^[3] were launched to collect and curate others’ photo submissions. Throughout the day, the story of “Bradying” quickly spread across major sports blogs, news sites and forums including Bleacher Report^[4], Yahoo Sports^[5] and SBnation^[6] among others. The “Bradying” phenomenon has been hastily described by a number of sports bloggers and journalists as the new replacement of “Tebowing,” another meme inspired by NFL player Tim Tebow’s pre-game prayer pose.

Notable Examples

On Twitter

Search Interest

While Google Insights reports a spike in search interest for the term “Bradying,” the overall volume of search queries is flatlined when compared to “Tebowing.”

External References