Jon Bois Keeps Finding Beauty in Miserable Sports Teams

Being a sports fan on the internet during any point of the last ten years means encountering the lovable and wacky Jon Bois on a regular basis. Bois began as an editor at SB Nation in 2009 and has been with the company ever since, co-founding their Secret Base video channel and producing a slew of memorable videos like an examination of the diabolical 1904 Olympic marathon and one about the concept of Scorigami, which has now fully entrenched itself in the football lexicon. He’s also built somewhat of a cult-like Twitter following along the way, thanks to a dedicated commitment to several tongue-in-cheek bits. But it’s not all frivolities for Bois. His story 17776, which imagines what football will look like in the year 17776, won a National Magazine Award for Digital Innovation.

But over the last three years, his calling card has been the sprawling, stat-heavy Dorktown documentaries that tell the entire story of snakebitten professional sports teams. He and Alex Rubenstein—his writing and production partner for these documentaries—have already knocked out the history of the Seattle Mariners and Atlanta Falcons. The first episode of the Mariners edition was listed by the New York Times as one of the best television episodes of 2020. Bois and Rubenstein’s latest venture is a seven-part behemoth about the Minnesota Vikings, the NFL’s purple-clad princes who are always the bridesmaid, never the bride, and perennially up to something. (In the span of five months in 2005, for instance, the Vikings had a player flagged at the airport for carrying a fake penis and threw a debaucherous sex party on a series of boats.)

The first episode of the Vikings doc debuts today on Secret Base’s YouTube channel, which Bois describes as “a documentary studio that likes to tell sports stories for people who don’t watch sports.” The final installment drops on September 8, right before the Vikings kick off their 2023 season. Calling in via Zoom from his Brooklyn apartment, Bois talked to GQ about the origins of this project, his general sports consumption philosophy, and the Whizzinator.

Bois: This does kind of continue the trilogy. With the Mariners, the Falcons, and the Vikings, the obvious through line between the three is that none of them have ever won a chip, right? To an extent, that is part of the allure to us. We think the stories of teams that haven’t won it all are sometimes underappreciated or underreported.

For the most part, the thing that attracted us to the Vikings was that there are more stories contained within that franchise than Alex and I have ever seen in any other sports franchise, ever. That includes the Yankees, the 49ers, anyone you want to name. If the Mariners are sort of the protagonist of their sport and the Falcons are the clowns and court jesters, the Vikings are the storytellers. We refer to the Vikings in the script as the great American storytellers. Their stories are primarily about football, but they tug on so many threads about what America is and what it’s become, for better or for worse. They’re just so unique in that way.

Yeah, for sure. It actually came to us in the middle of producing the Falcons doc a couple years ago. We got to that fateful 1998 [NFC Championship] game and were like, ‘We’ve got to talk about these Vikings someday.’ It was just a matter of when. We were not picking teams out of a hat. This one was kind of destined for us.

Oh man, there are so many. There were a lot of details I uncovered about their legendary coach, Bud Grant. In the national media, there’s the NFL Films version of Bud Grant, which is this stoic, legendary coach who was very stern-faced. You know, people describe him as authoritarian or whatever. But I found that wasn’t really the case. He was a guy who was not a disciplinarian. He had a very dry sense of humor. On his off days, for fun, he’d go out and get a live turkey and bring it into the office. He’d put it in the bathroom and just leave, so people would get scared whenever they walked in. He loved practical jokes. That’s kind of a side of him that—as a Minnesota outsider—I never really saw.

That stuff could be interesting for people who don’t know who Bud Grant is in the first place. A lot of football people do, and he’s kind of a deity in Minnesota. We’re very excited to do his story justice. Pete Carroll was actually one of the names in the running to succeed him in 1984, I believe. Carroll, at that time, would have been very young. But he would have been way better than the coach they ended up with, who is possibly the worst coach of all time.

I think I interpret something different from misery. I think the overbearing image of teams like the Mariners and Falcons and Vikings is that they are cursed, or haunted. The thing is, any team can win a Super Bowl! Most teams have won a Super Bowl! That doesn’t really make you special. It feels great to win one, as somebody who’s been a Chiefs fan my whole life, I saw them win their first title after the 2019 season. It was an amazing experience, but it wasn’t the best thing about being a Chiefs fan, by far. The Vikings have obviously had a lot of excruciating defeats. But what attracts somebody like me to sports are the fascinating people. It’s not a spreadsheet or whatever. I want to get to know these people and the amazing stories they lived through. That, to me, is much more interesting.

I think that varies from person to person. There’s no one type of being a fan that’s better or worse than any other kind. For instance, I’m one of the most loathsome types of NBA fans, which is the total bandwagoner. Whoever has the cool guys is the team I’m rooting for this year. There’s no right or wrong way to appreciate a team or determine what makes you happy and what doesn’t. The storytelling power of a team is what really draws me into them. Based on the reactions [we get], a lot of people have a similar way of thinking about it.

This one definitely felt a little heavier than it had before. Obviously, the Mariners have a very, very diehard fan base. They care about their history, and so do Falcons fans, but Vikings fans have this tradition of building and curating lore in a way that other fan bases really just don’t. We knew that if we got something wrong, we would hear about it. We’ve been very meticulous about our fact checking and everything.

I think a lot of fans will ask why we didn’t talk about this player or that player. We tried to answer that by sort of owning our status as outsiders. We’re fans of other teams. We definitely want to do right by Vikings fans and we hope they really enjoy it. From the outside looking in, this is what y’all appear to be. But at the same time, we want to be clear about who we are and aren’t. We know that if we asked Vikings fans to tell this story, it’d end up a little differently than how we’re going to tell it.

I know people who have to deliver fresh takes every single day. I pity those people and the position they’re in because they’re going to get yelled at all the time! We’re in a lucky spot where we can attack this thing and spend eight months really thinking about it and writing it out carefully. At the end of the day, it’s factually accurate, but our take is admittedly biased.

I tend to, as I’ve gotten older especially, find that my appreciation for sports has less to do with the trophies at the end of the season. I gravitate toward how much I like the team and the people involved. That goes back to that thing you asked about misery and what other people interpret as misery, I interpret as meaning and story. I can kind of side step the entire being sad process—which is my privilege as a non-fan—and go straight to the good stuff. Hey, they ended up rich and famous, and I ended up with a great story!

There’s also the infinite timeline thing. It’s not like Super Bowl 60 or whatever is going to be the last one and you’ve got to get your championship in now. There’s always that flicker in the distance. On an infinite timeline, the Vikings are going to win a Super Bowl. You know that there will be that catharsis and that climactic moment. Even if it’s not going to happen soon, that hope doesn’t die.

That would have been my sophomore year of high school. I remember watching it live in my basement, and I kind of wanted both teams to win. The Vikings meant something to me because of Randall Cunningham and Randy Moss. Those were two players where—if you went back even one or two years in a time machine and said these guys were going to form the greatest offensive juggernaut ever seen in football history—nobody would have believed it!

Two years before [the 1998 season], Cunningham was this old, retired guy who had opened a kitchen remodeling business in Las Vegas. He was just cutting marble and granite all day, and Randy Moss was sitting in jail, for reasons that basically amounted to getting caught smoking pot. It was completely unjust. Those were the two unlikeliest people ever to team up and form this superteam that, to this day, we haven’t really seen since. They were a really, really special team. They were so special that even that horrible loss in the playoffs can’t eclipse what they accomplished.

[chuckles] The list is really, really short. Although, I can say, the Vikings are so blessed with fascinating people that they have a new receiver—Justin Jefferson—who I would say is in that same tier. Jefferson is a lot different from Randy Moss, but he’s cool in a lot of the ways that Moss was cool. Super stylish, fashionable dude, and also from all I’m able to gather, he seems like a genuinely really good dude too. You kind of see a next generation reboot. ‘Oh man, we’ve got a cool guy all over again!’ I love that.

So, that’s a funny one. I expected there would be a lot. But it turns out, the aughts Vikings had the busiest single decade that any sports franchise has, like, ever had. It’s crazy. It’s going to be our longest video for that reason. Because of that, we actually only spend about 45 seconds talking about the Love Boat. The Love Boat, for as crazy as it was, is probably the 14th craziest thing that happened in that decade.

We didn’t even get to talk about the Whizzinator! The thing about the Vikings is that they never take a year off. Every single year they’ve ever had—and there’s been 63 of them—has had something going on. Whether it was feuds or dramas or heartbreaks or amazing players or off-field stuff, it’s really something.

Well, I think Kevin O’Connell seems like a great coach. Obviously, they’ve got great playmakers, Jefferson first and foremost. Kirk Cousins is very much a human funny mirror. You can look at him and see anything you want in that guy. That can be who he is as a person, who he is as a passer, whatever.

Last season was a funny mirror too because they went 13-4 and had a negative point differential, which means they allowed more points than they scored. It’s crazy that a 13-4 team could do that! Honestly, this is the most fun question to be asked about, because this is both the most interesting and the most unknowable team I’ve encountered in quite a long time. I gotta set my marker somewhere. I am going to say they go 12-5 and at least make the Divisional Round.

Yeah, this could come back to bite me because at the end of the Falcons project I was like, ‘You know what? This season I think they’re going to make the playoffs!’ They immediately combusted and have not been back to the playoffs.

I watched the first two episodes and I decided to sneak in one detail that I really liked. Cousins, you know, he’s this very square dude. A lot of people love him. A lot of people resent him. I kind of went in [to Quarterback] thinking maybe I’ve got this guy all wrong. I wanted to see what he was like in real life. Literally, one of the first things he says is an inspirational quote, and the quote is from Margaret Thatcher. It was amazing. I thought that was so perfect.

This interview has been edited and condensed