Vikings will win a Super Bowl, claims creator of video series on frustrating football teams

Being a Vikings fan isn't easy. Let's just acknowledge that ahead of the season opener this weekend. Among their other failures, they have have never won a Super Bowl, despite having four chances to do so.

That makes the team all the more interesting to Jon Bois.

Bois loves digging into the histories of frustrating sports franchises. A journalist for Secret Base, an SB Nation website, and a video writer/narrator/producer, he's done a comprehensive YouTube series on the Seattle Mariners (which didn't have a winning season for their first 14 years) and the Atlanta Falcons (which played in two Super Bowls and also never won).

Now, completing that trilogy, Bois is releasing "The History of the Minnesota Vikings," a seven-part series.

Over documentary-length episodes, the series dives deep into the team's founding in 1960 and follows it through its ups (including the famous Purple People Eaters era under coach Bud Grant) and downs (never having won a Super Bowl).

The series offers souped-up sports stats, with 3-D charts, newspaper clips and diagrams of pivotal plays. But the human stories are the real focus. In the first episode, for example, Bois recounts how Grant almost died in a Wisconsin blizzard in his youth, and goes on to talk about the coach's resiliency and compassion.

While Bois is clearly into teams that repeatedly break the hearts of their diehard fans, he remains optimistic, even tender, about the Vikings.

We talked about why he considers the Vikings the "Great American Story Tellers," why he compares the team to Charlie Brown and who his favorite Vikings coach is. (You'll never guess.) The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Why the Vikings? You're not from Minnesota, are you?

A: We're a documentary studio and like to approach things from an outsider's point of view most of the time. We love to focus on the history of a sports franchise and the stories it tells.

Alex Rubenstein, my producer, and myself, decided to tell the story of the Vikings. Frankly, neither of us are Vikings fans. As a [Kansas City] Chiefs fan, I can say that the story of my team is not nearly as interesting as the story of the Vikings.

Q: So what makes the Vikings so interesting?

A: We call them the "Great American Storytellers." By that we mean, not only are they a factory of so many fascinating and often really funny stories, [like a 1989 Jerry Burns press conference turned into an f-bomb counting contest], but they also pull on so many threads of Americana and what it means to be American in modern times.

When you dive into the Vikings story, there's a lot of themes related to Minnesotans' geographical place in America, their relationship to the cold and so many questions of identity that we found really fascinating.

Q: Being a Vikings fan can be exasperating. How did you keep the series so upbeat?

A: That's our general attitude toward sports in general. We default to celebrating a sport and appreciating all the people who make it what it is. It also helped that we told this story after the Atlanta Falcons, because now we know what a haunted, cursed team looks like.

And the Vikings are not that. Comparatively, the Vikings are a thoroughly pleasant story. Obviously, there's no shortage of heartbreak. But it's all temporary with the Vikings, because unlike any other franchise, they pick themselves up and return to competitiveness.

Q: How so?

A: We actually did some studies on this. The Vikings are the only team that has never linked together three losing seasons in a row in the Super Bowl era. They'll break your heart, but then they pick you right back up again. It might seem to some like Charlie Brown with the football, but eventually they'll kick that ball. They'll eventually win a Super Bowl.

Q: Wait. That was supposed to be my final question for you. So, do you think they really will win a Super Bowl?

A: You know what? I will go ahead and guarantee that they will. I mean, law of averages say they're definitely going to. I was born in 1982, and the Chiefs had never won a Super Bowl my entire life. And if it can happen for the Chiefs, there's no reason it can't happen for the Vikings.

Q: Football stats are not particularly interesting to me, still I'm a huge fan of your work. How do you draw casual football fans into your series?

A: Every chart we make, we make it with the complete non-fan in mind. Sometimes that means completely throwing on the brakes, stopping the train, and saying "OK, this is what that stat means." We like to break it down to the basics. It takes a really slow burn. The series-long chart we make with the Vikings is a big, gigantic, 3-D sprawling chart that wouldn't make sense to start with. But we build it slowly, like a Lego set.

Q: Many of the people you introduce in the Vikings series — Alan Page, Bud Grant, even Jim Klobuchar — are loved Minnesota legends. What is it about football that elevates people to hero status?

A: I don't think it's an accident that Americans have flocked to the NFL. It resembles war way more than basketball, baseball and hockey. You've literally got ground attacks, aerial attacks, the field general. You've got clear lines of victory and defeat. And you walk away with — comparative to war — very little to feel guilty about.

Q: What's your favorite piece of Vikings lore?

A: I love basically everything that happened in the office between 2000 and 2009. It's the busiest decade that I think a single sports franchise has ever had. I love everything that happened during [coach] Mike Tice's tenure. I like Mike Tice a whole lot. He gave us a ton of material and seems like a really good guy.

Q: I'm sure there some fans who disagree with you on that one. How did you approach the 2018 Minneapolis Miracle, in which Stefon Diggs caught a 27-yard pass to win the NFC playoff game in the final seconds?

A: We actually cut the Minneapolis Miracle from the project. We're like, "Who cares? No one wants to see that."

Just kidding. It seems like the Minneapolis Miracle lifted the spirits of a lot of people in Minnesota. It was a truly special thing. It's still one of the most unbelievable moments I've ever seen in sports.

"The History of the Minnesota Vikings" by Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein is available to watch on YouTube, for free.