Towards the end of “The History of the Atlanta Falcons” (2021), a seven-part, nearly seven-hour documentary, writer-director Jon Bois chronicles a surprise 82-yard interception return by Falcons cornerback Robert Alford, executed with just a few minutes left in the first half of Super Bowl LI, in 2017, as “one of the most influential individual plays in all of NFL history.”
Almost any other filmmaker would have left it at that. But Bois shows his work. On the sports statistics website pro-football-reference.com, Bois explains, there’s a metric called expected points that “estimates how many points an offense is expected to score on a drive before a given game and after that game.” Subtract one from the other and you determine the overall impact of the piece. Alford’s interception return resulted in -7 points for the New England Patriots on a drive that should have given them three, for a 10.7 difference. Bois pulls out a chart that plots the difference “of all 8,982 individual games in Super Bowl history.” We can clearly see that the Alford touchdown is the third greatest of all time.
This was not an exaggeration for rhetorical effect. When Bois says a play is “one of the most impressive,” he means it.
Bois is the laureate poet of sports statistics. His documentaries, including the critically acclaimed “The History of the Seattle Mariners” (2020) and the recent Charlotte Bobcats themed “The People You’re Paying to Be in Shorts” (both streamed on his YouTube channel, Secret Base), are full of graphs, charts, and diagrams that painstakingly plot wins, losses, runs, home runs, and field goals with an rigor bordering on scientific.
“I was one of the weird kids who actually loved algebra in high school,” Bois said in a video interview recently. “And growing up I just loved the statistical side of sports. The ability to summarize sports in a bar chart or a pie chart or a scatter chart – in a way you can watch a thousand matches in 10 seconds. It’s like a little time warp.”
A longtime sports writer and editor at SB Nation, the respected sports industry blog owned by Vox Media, Bois, 40, has emerged as a unique voice in documentary filmmaking — in part, he explained, because of the style he “comes up against”. ran” as a result of his “limited technical capabilities.” Bois is a self-taught video editor with no background in motion graphics. Unusually, he does most of his video work within the Google Earth satellite imagery app, importing images directly into Google’s 3D environments and using the satellite maps as a virtual sandbox of sorts. It’s a bit like a PowerPoint presentation transferred to a street map, with huge blocks of text floating above pixelated representations of roads and baseball stadiums.
The style is unmistakable. The camera seems to hover in mid-air over graphs and charts, and, as Bois or one of his collaborators tells us, we’re treated to old photos, quotes from newspaper clippings, and the occasional grainy excerpt from archival game footage. And all of that has been scored into soft, synth-laden hunting rock and smooth jazz. It’s like Ken Burns edited “Moneyball” with a Steely Dan soundtrack.
“In an era of impersonal and interchangeable Internet content, Bois has a signature all of his own,” said Jordan Cronk, a film critic and founder of the Acropolis Cinema, a Los Angeles screening series. “Unlike other journalists who have tried filmmaking, Bois found a cutting-edge form for pop-encyclopedic explorations of sports history, combining a YouTuber’s flair for storytelling with a tradition of hyper-analytical essay cinema.”
Bois acknowledged that “for better or for worse, it doesn’t look or sound like anything else out there.” And for him the main thing is “not to be better than anyone else, but to be different from everyone else.”
No less unique are the kinds of stories Bois and his regular co-writer and producer Alex Rubenstein tell. The teams, players and seasons they target are typically not well known and lack the obvious drama of underdog success or rags to riches glory. The Mariners, Falcons and Bobcats are not perennial favorites or inspirational fodder. Their lore is esoteric and unusual.
“We realized that in a thousand years no one would make a movie about the history of the Mariners or the history of the Falcons,” Bois said. “Those stories wouldn’t be addressed the way they deserve.”
Bois’ level of exacting detail can be overwhelming and, over generous running times, sometimes tiresome. But his work is not for stats nerds who want to indulge in numbers. His approach actually has the opposite effect: the depth of the films makes them more accessible. You don’t need to know anything about the Mariners to enjoy his nearly four-hour documentary about them. You don’t even have to know anything about baseball.
“He manages to use statistics not as background support for dramatic entertainment, but as the most prominent and visually stimulating element in his stories,” said Jake Cole, a film critic at Slant Magazine.
As Bois put it, he and Rubenstein make “sports documentaries for people who don’t watch sports.”
“I think it’s not only a great honor, but also a lot of fun to be able to bring this cool, weird, often stupid world of sports to someone who wouldn’t otherwise get the invite,” said Bois.
Essential to that experience is being swept up in the vicarious thrill of an unfamiliar team and its everyday drama. Bois and Rubenstein manage to squeeze decades of often tumultuous history into a few hours of densely packed non-fiction, chronicling the dramatic account of the rise and fall (or fall and further fall) of an obscure team on a memorable scale. After watching one of their films, you inevitably feel an intimate connection to the subject: you know every heartbreaking loss of the Bobcats and every hard-fought victory of the Mariners. It’s a satisfying entry into a world normally reserved for homegrown fans.
Bois doesn’t necessarily come to these stories as a fan himself. His latest, “The People You’re Paying to Be in Shorts,” is about the 2011-2012 Charlotte Bobcats, a short-lived team that was somewhat infamous among basketball fans for their record-breaking terribleness and broke NBA records for losing streaks before reverted to its previous name, the Hornets, in 2014. (The team was the Charlotte Hornets from 1988 to 2002.)
But Bois was quick to admit that he’s no expert on the NBA. To deliver this all-encompassing look at a truly crappy season, he enlisted basketball-specializing producer Seth Rosenthal and spent countless hours studying old copies of The Charlotte. Observer, who read “everything they wrote about the Bobcats” during that period. “I realized I didn’t have to be an expert in basketball,” said Bois. “But I can arbitrarily be the world’s leading expert on this one season of one team,” he added, with an expletive for the hopeless Bobcats.
The result is a documentary that pushes you to this wonderful assortment of eccentric balls, despite realizing how incredibly awful they are. He delves into the minutiae of contract negotiations, career field goal percentages, and NBA lottery odds in a way that makes the numbers extraordinarily compelling, and he finds the cosmic beauty in the contrast between the worst team in league history and their most important owner. , Michael Jordan, the greatest player of all time. It’s not just that you end up knowing more about an obscure team. You are moved by them.
“I work under the general theory that there is always a story,” Bois said. “I could throw a dart at any team every season — the 2005 Timberwolves, the 1987 Astros, whoever, and I could find something. There is always something no matter what.”
He paused. “Although,” he reconsidered, “the weirder and more horrible the team is, the better.”
