I finally watched Moneyball. It’s a book-turned-movie about the Oakland A’s and how they took a team of misfits, analyzed a ton of stats and became successful because of it. The idea inspired other teams to do the same.

I read the book, and I was really excited to see the movie. But after sitting through what seemed like the longest movie ever, I didn’t understand the hype. The movie was so boring. It’s because the story wasn’t about baseball. It was more about Billy Beane proving himself to the baseball world and to his family.

Sports movies always use sports as a backdrop for life’s greatest lessons. Disney takes an inspirational story and turns it into a major blockbuster. For example, “Remember the Titans.” It’s a story about how football taught the town about tolerance and acceptance. However, there was very little football in the movie. Instead, the movie focused on the players, the coaches and the town. It’s one of the best football movies out there, yet there is very little football.

Another football movie that was a disappointing miss was The Blind Side. It tells the story of Michael Oher, an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens. Oher grew up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood, bouncing from house to house because his mother was a drug addict, who didn’t even know his father. A white family takes Oher in, giving him a large house to call home, a private school education, and the chance to play high school and college football. It’s a sweet story, and it shows how tough Oher is. But other than that, it’s a sappy, cheesy, inspirational story. I walked out of the theater feeling like I was in a sugar coma. I had read the book first. It provided a harsh backstory and some other revelations about the motives behind the Tuohy family. It is an intense book, and it wouldn’t have done well as a movie. Oher himself said that the movie was inaccurate, and that it portrayed him as a totally different person.

In real life, the best sports stories are often the ones about the human aspect of an event. Lance Armstrong is a phenomenal cyclist, yet the greater story is that he beat cancer and won the Tour de France seven times. Nobody cares how well Mike Tyson could fight The more interesting story was his drugged-up lifestyle and psychotic personality. Movies are just mirroring the stories, with little focus on the actual sporting event, and more on the interesting backstories. With the Olympics coming up this summer, there are bound to be stories of comebacks and stories about athletes who had nothing growing up, yet made it to the competition.

There’s a lot of criticism that movies about sports are not about sports. To appeal to a wider audience, movies can’t be all about a game or a season. If someone wants to sit down and watch a lot of football, they turn on a game. The right movie has to find balance, something that very few movies have been able to find.