Secret Base to roll out 7 part ‘Dorktown Presents: The History of the Atlanta Falcons’ series in August

There’s no telling what the documentary will focus on, but it will be excellent.

As Falcons fans, we have plenty of experience being simultaneously excited about something and dreading it with every fiber of our being. A new seven part documentary of sorts about Atlanta’s favorite deeply disappointing football team is another opportunity to exercise those twin impulses.

“Dorktown Presents: The History of the Atlanta Falcons” is going to be great. It’s from SB Nation’s Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein, who delivered the fantastic “Dorktown Presents: The History of the Seattle Mariners” last year. That documentary didn’t carry the sheen of ESPN’s big-budget documentaries, but it did manage to capture exactly the Mariners in all their weird, star-crossed glory, from their most intense ineptitude to their star-studded heights, which were not as high as you might expect given the talent on hand. If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out.

When Bois teased a new team-focused series of videos on Tuesday, I had exactly zero information to indicate that it would be the Falcons the duo would chronicle, but a gut feeling it would be. If you were going to dive into NFL teams with bizarre, sometimes wonderful, often tragic histories, you’d probably focus on a small set of franchises that include the Lions, Browns, Vikings, Bills and our Falcons. Given this team’s recent history and some games I really am getting tired of talking about, they felt like a logical choice for a series that’s heavy on graphs, numbers and oddities. Here we are.

It goes without saying that the Falcons have provided plenty of material. A deeply lousy franchise throughout much of the first 30 years of their existence, Atlanta nevertheless hosted Hall of Famers, traded them and sometimes even let them walk in free agency. They had genuinely wonderful seasons that fell short, unbelievably terrible seasons featuring statistically unlikely things, and a lot of “this is the first time this has happened in NFL history” moments throughout. We love them dearly and we’re in the midst of preparing for what might be a middle-of-the-road season, but this video series will likely be a much more comprehensive reminder of the weird, dispiriting and thrilling ways this team has operated than you’ve gotten from things like our season snapshots and Forgotten Falcons series over the years.

We’ll see exactly when the series lands, but I’ll encourage you all to check it out when it does, and we’ll likely put together at least one writeup on it. Joe Ali and Kofie Yeboah from Secret Base will also be making appearances and they’re both gifted story tellers, and longtime SB Nation reporter and jaded, diehard Falcons fans Steven Godfrey (who you may remember from SB Nation Atlanta, if you’ve been around awhile) will also be contributing. Stay tuned for updates and subscribe to Secret Base’s YouTube channel if you haven’t to this point.