Orange Bowl star builds filmmaking career with his sports expertise
Documentary filmmaker Micah Brown, director of the "Sign Stealer" documentary on Netflix, spotlights fascinating stories from across the sports world.
The play that most Kansas football fans remember Micah Brown for—his catch of a fake-punt pass from fullback Brandon McAnderson in the 2008 Orange Bowl—was a life-changing event he never saw coming.
Brown, c’09, recalls that throughout practice, McAnderson, c’08, had thrown the pass to the other side of the field; when he saw the ball headed toward him during the tense, back-and-forth game, Brown wasn’t certain whether it was a pass or a blocked punt.
“I just saw a ball come flying out of the crowd of people, wobbling all over the place,” Brown remembers. “I stopped, turned around, caught it a little bit off the ground, like my life was flashing before my eyes.”
The play, which elevated Brown from a walk-on team member to a scholarship player, might have come out of nowhere, yet his foray into documentary filmmaking was easy to foresee. Some of his early work as a theatre and media arts major involved YouTube clips he published of his band, highlight packages of the football team, and short films that included teammates.
Brown’s football background and documentary success helped him get a strong foothold in the film industry, and most recently helped him direct “Sign Stealer,” a feature on Netflix’s “Untold” series that quickly rose to the network’s No. 1 documentary spot. That result came after an accelerated timeline that started with an invitation to attend the 2023 season’s national championship football game with Connor Stalions, a University of Michigan staffer who had resigned earlier in the season amid sign-stealing allegations.
The Stalions reaction footage from that game that appears in the documentary was shot on Brown’s phone.
“That was the first day I met him, and we hit it off,” Brown says. “And then from there, it’s about seeing whether you think that person who has an interesting story that became national news could carry a documentary. And so it’s really about kind of exploring what all of the story beats are. I thought that it could, then Netflix greenlit it, and then we were off to the races.”
That’s an apt description, as Brown and his production team compacted a yearlong production process into five months, with Netflix airing “Sign Stealer” Aug. 27.
This was not Brown’s first rodeo with college football documentaries. In fact, his skills and ties to Kansas led to his making “The Gridiron,” the first all-access, “Hard Knocks”-style documentary series that followed a college football program. It was an idea that grew from then-Kansas coach Turner Gill asking Brown to produce recruiting videos. Brown had other ideas.
“I said, ‘I have this bigger vision that I want to do if I’m going to leave (making) movie trailers,’” Brown says, referencing his early professional credits. “I want to make films, and I feel like I could do ‘Hard Knocks’ for a college team, and you could use that for recruiting.”
“The Gridiron” was a hit, collecting regional Emmys in 2010 and 2011; Brown notes that he picked up 50 job offers that first year as other college programs quickly developed their own iterations.
After Gill’s departure, Brown founded his production company, Second Wind Creative, and began producing and directing for such prominent outlets as ESPN, “Last Chance U” and Showtime. His breakout came in 2017 with his long-form documentary debut, “Prison Fighters: 5 Rounds to Freedom,” about a Thai prison where inmates fight each other for their release.
“Prison Fighters” earned a nomination for Documentary of the Year at the 2018 Cynopsis Awards, and led to Brown joining the talented “30 for 30” lineup with “Chuck and Tito,” a feature on the rivalry between UFC fighters Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz.
“That was the goal when I went into documentaries,” Brown says. “The dream was to do a ‘30 for 30,’ and I achieved it pretty quickly.”
Brown continued widening his creative interests with “WWE Evil” on Peacock and “The Ride,” a look at professional bull riders that streams on Amazon Prime. Brown also directs “Coach Prime,” an Amazon Prime series that examines the sensational rise of Deion Sanders at the University of Colorado.
His projects have hit at a terrific rate: “Chuck and Tito” and “The Ride” are their sports’ most-viewed documentaries, and “WWE Evil,” “Coach Prime” and “Sign Stealer” debuted as the No. 1 documentaries on Peacock, Amazon Prime and Netflix, respectively.
Stalions comes across as a multilayered character in “Sign Stealer,” and getting NCAA commentary on camera was a coup for Brown. Even superfans from rival Ohio State helped stir the pot as the allegations began to bubble to the surface. Brown said that part was perhaps the most shocking to him.
“I’ve been a part of a lot of great rivalries. That Kansas-Missouri rivalry is very intense for a lot of different reasons,” he says. “But whenever you have what would be seen as a crime involved between the two schools—or a scandal, I guess you would say—it kind of takes that rivalry to a whole new level.”
Kevin Flaherty, j’05, an Olathe freelance writer, has covered Kansas and the Big 12 for several outlets for more than 20 years.
Top photo courtesy of Micah Brown
Orange Bowl photo courtesy of Kansas Athletics
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