Oshkosh man recalls his now-iconic Packers viral post; 'It was a little bit of Miller Lite and a lot of confidence in our quarterback'
This story was published in 2019 about a memorable moment from a 2017 Packers game at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, shortly before the Packers played in the same venue again (and won). Green Bay returns to Dallas again for the wild-card playoff opener Sunday.
Kevin Speigl drove all the way home from Dallas before he knew he'd become a viral sensation.
The Oshkosh native had traveled with friends, including a Cowboys fan, to AT&T Stadium in Dallas to see his beloved Packers play Oct. 8, 2017. The Packers return to Dallas on Oct. 6 for the first time since the memorable finish that afternoon, a thrilling 35-31 win on a touchdown catch by Davante Adams with 11 seconds on the clock.
Speigl's road trip wound up being a heck of a story, and not just because the Packers rallied.
Adorned in his Clay Matthews jersey and sporting a mustache loosely reminiscent of quarterback Aaron Rodgers, Speigl and his friends obtained seats near the back of the building.
"I try to make it at least one or two games a year," Speigl said. "I get to go through work every now and then; there are extra tickets usually. ... I don't usually go to away games."
Speigl's hilarious moment of clairvoyance captured on Snapchat became shared across social media. It's the No. 1 all-time post on the Green Bay Packers subreddit on Reddit, a message board of 120,000 subscribed members, with more than 30,000 "up votes."
With 1:13 to go, Dak Prescott rushed for a touchdown that gave the Cowboys the lead, 31-28. In the aftermath of that score, Speigl took a picture of himself with a knowing smile on his face as Cowboys fans celebrated in the background. His message: "They celebrating with 1:13 in the fourth lmao..."
The implication: No worries, Rodgers has plenty of time to lead a comeback.
"It was a little bit of Miller Lite and a lot of confidence in our quarterback," Speigl said. "It was a good mix, about 50/50."
Spiegl's confidence was rewarded by lightning-quick touchdown drive engineered by Rodgers and Davante Adams
Perhaps you remember what came next.
Rodgers completed a 14-yard pass to Martellus Bennett that put the Packers in Dallas territory with 47 seconds left. Aaron Jones ran for 15 yards to the Dallas 32, but when he was held to 2 yards on 2nd and 10, the Packers used their third and final timeout.
Rodgers then ran for 18 yards on third down to the Dallas 12. After an incomplete pass to Davante Adams, Rodgers snapped the ball with 16 seconds left and went back to the exact same matchup and found Adams for a 12-yard touchdown. It's one of Rodgers' more memorable regular-season moments.
Dallas tried one last gasp from its own 25 with a series of laterals that ultimately went nowhere. The Packers moved to 4-1 with the win, although the season eventually went south with a Rodgers injury the following week, and the Packers finished the year at 7-9.
Speigl, it seems, saw it all coming.
"It started out as a video, and I sent it to the stadium (Snapchat) story," he said. "Someone must have seen it on there; I was just happy to make it on that. Someone must have screenshotted it and started sending it around."
It's not unusual for stadiums or arenas to offer these social-media channels, where users can submit their images into essentially a slide show of fan experiences. It's ironic that Snapchat — a medium created with the intention of offering a place for content that would disappear within 24 hours — is the platform that made Speigl's confidence famous.
"I think we got home at probably 1 o'clock in the morning, and I went to bed," Speigl said. "I woke up the next day and had a couple text messages, one was somebody saying, 'Hey did you know you're blowing up on Instagram?' I said, 'No I don't, because I don't have (an Instagram account).' I had somebody else say I was the top topic on Reddit. I still don't have one of those either.
"I thought, 'That's cool, it'll fade in a couple hours.'"
It didn't.
Some of it gets a little weird for Speigl; 'Someone is going to put my face in their living room?'
Speigl does have Facebook, but he found he had to turn off notifications that week because he was getting so many friend requests, including from people he didn't know.
"It was going crazy," he said. "People I hadn't talked to in years were saying, 'Just so you know, I saw you.'"
Some of the comments he said were strange, even with good intentions.
"Someone said that they were going to blow up the picture and put it in their living room, which I find disturbing," he said with a laugh. "Someone is going to put my face in their living room, someone they had never met? I had a lot of them people asking how I got out alive. Really no big story there. Everybody in Texas is so nice, it was like being at Lambeau. Everybody was so polite. They might razz you a little, and you'd razz back."
Speigl, an operations coordinator for WOW Logistics warehousing company in Oshkosh, said some friends told him he had to keep the mustache.
"I had done stupid stuff like that before with the facial hair, but I was trying going for the Rodgers classic handlebar," he said. "I just thought it would be kind of funny to do it and my buddy did the same thing, trying for the handlebar mustache at Jerryworld."
He did get rid of it, though today he said he has grown it back — "just a straight mustache" this time.
Speigl said his confidence in Rodgers and the Packers hasn't wavered despite back-to-back years without a playoff berth.
"I'm confident every game, but obviously last year was not great," he said. "It's one of those things where it's your team and you have to be confident that they're going to win it. If you assume they're going to lose, there's no point in watching."
JR Radcliffe can be reached at (262) 361-9141 or jradcliffe@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JRRadcliffe.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Oshkosh man's viral Snapchat post foretold Packers win over Cowboys