Orange Bowl star and FMS alum builds filmmaking career with his sports expertise

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.

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