Jon Bois is a sports writer, video producer and YouTuber. He is currently employed as the creative director at SB Nation. Bois is known for his speculative fiction works on sports, such as 17776 and "The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles," as well as his documentary video series including "Pretty Good", "Chart Party", and "Dorktown".
Career
Jon Bois was born on September 24, 1982 and is originally from Louisville, Kentucky. Bois started as an editor at SB Nation in 2009. From 2013 to 2015, Bois published "Breaking Madden," a series of articles in which he created unusual football scenarios in the Madden NFL video games. In August 2014, he published "The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles," a sports story based on the fictional premise that NFL quarterback Tim Tebow had instead played his career in the Canadian Football League. In May 2015, Bois published the first episode of a documentary video series called "Pretty Good." The series told true stories of unusual events, often related to sports, such as the career path of baseball player Lonnie Smith, professional poker, and the infamous 1904 Olympic marathon, but also including a variety of other topics such as the Lawnchair Larry flight and the TV series 24. the series has thirteen episodes, the last of which was published in September 2017. In 2016, Bois began another documentary video series called "Chart Party," in which he used statistical analysis to explore and understand sports stories. Of particular note, Bois published an episode in December 2016 called "Every NFL Score Ever," in which he discussed how football's scoring system makes some final game scores very unlikely, and coined the term "scorigami" to describe the act of achieving a never-before-seen final result. The video led one viewer to create a website to track new scorigami instances, and the term has seen usage in other sports publications. In July 2017, Bois published a serialized multimedia narrative called 17776, a work of speculative fiction describing unusual forms of football played in the distant future. According to Bois, the story garnered four million pageviews from 700,000 unique visitors in two weeks. The series won a National Magazine Award for Digital Innovation from the American Society of Magazine Editors. A chapter of Upon Further Review, a collection of sports what-if scenarios compiled by editor Mike Pesca published in 2018, was written by Bois, with his scenario being "What If Basketball Rims Were Smaller Than Basketballs?" In April 2018, Bois and fellow SB Nation personality Alex Rubenstein began the series "Dorktown", which followed a similar format and style as his prior series "Pretty Good", showcasing unusual events, statistics, and personalities from sports history. In 2020, Bois and Rubenstein released a 6-part special mini-series of Dorktown chronicling the history of the Seattle Mariners baseball franchise. In 2018, Bois collaborated with Felix Biederman of Chapo Trap House on the five-part documentary "Fighting In the Age of Loneliness", presented in style influenced by British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, which focuses on the development of Mixed Martial arts from the early development of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Vale Tudo in the development of more complex fighting styles. It focuses on the development of Mixed Martial Arts as a mainstream sport, including Pride Fighting Championship and the development of Ultimate Fighting Championships, and their parallels to the 21st centuryneoliberal socio-political landscape of financial collapse and inequality. In 2019, Bois released a two-part series on professional athletes named Bob. He is a Kansas City Chiefs fan.
