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Down the Rabbit Hole with Jon Bois
Derek Pharr
February 19, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes
Numbers tell stories, but only if you know how to listen to them.
The most profound insights often hide in plain sight, waiting for someone patient enough to notice them. With that spirit in mind, I'm excited to continue Down the Rabbit Hole, a series that explores how innovative thinkers find meaning in the details others might overlook.
Ever notice how the best stories often come from places most people never think to look? You know those moments when something familiar suddenly shows you a whole new side of itself? That's what happens when you take the time to really look closer. I'm excited to continue Down the Rabbit Hole, a series that celebrates the people who see past the obvious to find something extraordinary in the details others might miss.
For this edition, I'm thrilled to feature one of digital media's most original creators. Jon Bois doesn’t just tell sports stories—he rewrites the way we think about them. Through his work with SB Nation, Secret Base, and groundbreaking projects like 17776, Jon has turned stats, history, and what-ifs into something far bigger than just sports. He finds poetry in box scores, epiphanies in Excel sheets, and profound humanity in the places most storytellers never think to look.
Whether he's charting the impossible dreams of a struggling quarterback, simulating the longest baseball game ever played or visualizing the mathematical beauty of a perfect punt, Jon brings a storyteller’s heart to a statistician’s brain. His work reminds us that sports aren't just about what happened—they're about what could have happened, what almost happened, and what it all means about who we are as people who care deeply about games.
Jon Bois: Down the Rabbit Hole
Q1: Your work often finds beauty in seemingly mundane moments or overlooked statistics. What's one story or discovery that still surprises you, even after all these years?
Jon Bois:
I’ll answer with a general phenomenon and a specific moment. The general phenomenon is how nonchalant NFL officials used to be about spotting the ball until around the late ‘80s-early ‘90s. Alex Rubenstein, my Dorktown co-producer, and I have spent a good amount of time reviewing old NFL games that predate standardized play-by-play data, and while trying to reconstruct that data we’ve found so many occasions in which the officials spotted the ball in absurd locations. Even through the grainy old footage, it’s obvious that they gave a team a full yard or two they didn’t actually gain, or cheated them by a full yard or two that prevented them from being awarded a first down. Neither the players nor the coaches would even protest the spot, either. Absolutely inconceivable to imagine that happening in today’s NFL, but it happened all the time.
More specifically, it’s gotta be the Troy State-DeVry basketball game from 1992 in which Troy State scored a record 253 points in a single game. It’s gone down in the books as 258 points, but when I reviewed the game tape from start to finish about 25 years later, I realized that they’d actually scored five points fewer. Evidently, the scorer mistakenly counted a couple of buckets that weren’t actually scored, and the total of 258 has stuck to this day. Some folks have argued on my behalf that the score should be officially changed, but I don’t care too much either way. I just find it fascinating that we could get such a historically significant record wrong, and that even when clear evidence is presented to the contrary, we stick with the wrong total anyway.
Q2: What's something about sports statistics that you never noticed until you started telling stories through them?
Jon Bois:
That statistical outliers are almost a cheat code for finding interesting stories beyond, “this was a statistical outlier.” If you find a weird statistical outlier or trend, there’s usually a weird story behind it that you’ll find if you dig up stories about that game. And if there isn’t, and a bizarre statistic has emerged for no real reason? Well, that’s its own story.
Q3: You've pioneered a unique style of digital storytelling. What's one creative challenge you faced while developing your approach that ended up leading to an unexpected breakthrough?
Jon Bois:
I first started producing videos in 2015. That was the peak of the Facebook video era. All anyone ever talked about was how important it was to hook a viewer within the first three to five seconds and either convince or trick them into watching the other two minutes. Audiences were being served pig slop and being completely disrespected. From the jump, I was very intentional about trying to completely go in the opposite direction – I’d much rather have a thousand people genuinely enjoy my video than have a million people notice it.
I’d much rather have a thousand people genuinely enjoy my video than have a million people notice it.
Still, though, I’ve caught myself falling into that short-attention-span trap from time to time. I still do. I’ll worry that if a particular shot moves really slowly and eats up 20 or 30 seconds without whooshing around or adding new elements, I’ll lose the viewer’s interest. I have to remind myself: “look, this is 20 minutes into a video. If they’re gonna bail, they’re gonna bail, but you’ve probably sold them already. Just say what you need to say.” Internet audiences are far, far smarter than they’re ever given credit for. They’re also appreciative. If they feel like you’re really trying to come through for them and give them something special, they’ll stick around for you.
Q4: What’s a sports moment that has profoundly shaped the way you think about life?
Jon Bois:
When I was in high school, my school played in the 3A Kentucky state football championship. Their quarterback was Jared Lorenzen. Lorenzen later played for the Giants and won a Super Bowl ring as Eli Manning’s backup, but the thing to know about him is that he was GIGANTIC. Ask any football fan anywhere who’s the largest quarterback they’ve ever seen, and they will tell you it was Jared Lorenzen.
He was gigantic in high school, too, especially when contrasted with my buddies in fifth-period chemistry who weren’t much bigger than me and tried to tackle him. It’s like he was 20 feet tall and weighed a thousand pounds. If you’ve ever flicked some droplets of water into a piping-hot skillet to test whether it’s hot enough to throw on a steak, then you’ve seen what I saw from the stands that day. They just took one bounce off him and evaporated. He could throw the ball a mile, but didn’t really need to, because he just ran and ran. We lost, 56-7.
Jared Lorenzen passed away in 2019, having never understood the gift he gave me that day. Odds are that at some point in your life, you did something that you found trivial, and might have forgotten five minutes later, but someone else will remember for the rest of their lives. Happens in sports, and life, all the time.
Odds are that at some point in your life, you did something that you found trivial, and might have forgotten five minutes later, but someone else will remember for the rest of their lives. Happens in sports, and life, all the time.
Q5: Outside of sports, what's a fascinating rabbit hole you've gone down lately that's captured your attention?
Jon Bois:
Right now, that’s the development of the transatlantic telegraph cable that was attempted, and eventually successful, in the 1850s and 1860s. It was an absolutely extraordinary achievement of engineering, and they only got there after committing just about every screwup imaginable. If anyone’s interested, they can subscribe to the Secret Base’s Patreon, where I’m currently rolling out a four-part documentary series about the entire story.
Closing Thoughts
Sports statistics are often treated as endpoints - final scores, career totals, season records. But in Bois's hands, they become starting points for deeper explorations into human nature. His reflection on Jared Lorenzen captures this approach: a seemingly routine high school football game elevated into a meditation on memory, impact, and the unexpected ways we touch each other's lives.
What makes Bois's work special isn't just his ability to spot statistical anomalies - it's his understanding that behind every number, there's a story waiting to be told. As he said, finding those outliers is 'almost a cheat code' for discovering something meaningful about the games we love and the people who play them. His current fascination with the transatlantic telegraph cable shows that this approach works far beyond the realm of sports. When you learn to look closely enough, every dataset contains a drama waiting to be uncovered.
Explore more of Jon’s storytelling and deep-dive sports narratives through Secret Base on YouTube, where he and his team uncover the strangest, funniest, and most fascinating moments in sports history. His work, from The History of the Atlanta Falcons to 17776, redefines what sports journalism can be—blending data, creativity, and existential wonder.
To keep up with Jon’s latest projects, follow him on Bluesky and check out his work on Secret Base. Whether you're a die-hard sports fan or just love a good story, his content is a journey worth taking.
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That's all for now. See you next week.
Derek Pharr