He’s uniting fans one meme at a time.
A lifelong fan of the Tennessee Volunteers found himself at the center of a burgeoning meme featuring his own face after his animated reactions caught the eye of the jumbotron operator — and his employers, who thought he was out sick.
Jeff Comeaux, a Knoxville native, displayed a rollercoaster of emotions during the close game against the Georgia Bulldogs on Saturday, which saw the undefeated team from the Peach State come out on top during overtime.
Comeaux doesn’t have a good poker face, and an eagle-eyed jumbotron operator picked up on this.
Throughout the last few minutes of the game, when the score was neck and neck, the camera kept panning back to the Vols fan, who had no idea the entire stadium was laughing at his expressive reactions.
At one point, Comeaux just stood there with his arms crossed over his chest as he watched on in apparent disappointment.
All the while, he had no idea all eyes were on him.
He didn’t realize until after the game, when he checked his phone and found more than 200 texts from friends and even acquaintances talking about his big-screen feature during the game.
The texts clued him in, and a random attendee who pointed at him while he was exiting the stadium and shouted, “That’s the guy!”
Unfortunately, his employer was among those who came across reposted videos of Comeaux’s act.
“I got to a point where I was like, you know what, the best thing to do is I’m just gonna call in sick today. And I got Coldplayed,” Comeaux told WBIR.
Screenshots of Comeaux quickly circulated online, with some even edited to show him wearing a Georgia jersey. Others included the picture of him staring ahead, apparently defeated, captioned with jokes like “When the Red Lobster waiter says you can’t have anymore [sic] biscuits.”
“Everyone was like, ‘Man, you are my soul, you are my spirit animal’. And honestly, I’ve gotten as many comments from Georgia fans as I have Tennessee fans,” he told the outlet.
Comeaux said that he used to go to every single rival matchup game hosted by the Vols, but had to let go around 2002.
He said that the only major game he missed over 12 years was when the Vols trounced the number two seed Florida Gators during overtime in 1998, rounding out their first perfect season in decades.
Now, the die-hard fan goes when he can — usually when a friend has a spare ticket, and when he’s certain he can spare a faux sick day.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
