Throughout the years, screengrabs of old episodes from “The Simpsons” have resurfaced on social media to prove that the writers somehow predicted the future.
There was President Trump. That Disney would acquire a division of Fox. A pandemic and killer insects. That the U.S. would beat Sweden in curling.
This week, three screengrabs from several different episodes surfaced together as one meme on Twitter:
- One image has Bengals cheerleaders
- Another shows Homer with "Go Bengals" on his chest
- A third shows "Bengals win Super Bowl" with an exact score: Cincinnati 34, Los Angeles 31
A tweet from NFL Memes Twitter account, published Tuesday night, had 81,000 likes.
Then bettors actually started running with it.
FanDuel spokesman Kevin Hennessy said Wednesday that a slew of bettors bet on Cincinnati’s score in the Super Bowl to end up at 34 and the Rams at 31, with a significant number of bettors parlaying the two.
Bengals 34, Rams 31 is now FanDuel's most-bet exact score prop.
“We have a variety of scores to choose from,” Hennessy said. “This is one, but there are a lot of others. We weren’t originally aware of the meme until we noticed it was being selected.”
It's also BetMGM's most popular exact score. The book lowered it from 125-1 to 80-1 because of all the action, MGM trader Darren Darby told The Action Network.
There's just one issue. The screengrabs are doctored.
As Newsweek discovered, most of the images come from an episode in January 1992.
The Bengals aren’t playing the Rams in that episode. They are playing the Dolphins.
“In that episode, the Cincinnati Bengals are one of the teams in the Super Bowl, and Homer keeps being told by people that they are a definite to win the game,” Newsweek wrote. “After Lisa chooses the other team, however, he bets on them and wins $50.”
The “Go Bengals” Homer image is from an episode that aired 13 years later.
So no, the Simpsons didn’t predict that the Bengals would beat an LA team in the Super Bowl, but if somehow the Bengals win 34-31 on Sunday, sportsbooks could be out millions of dollars.
