Graphic: NFL Offensive Consistency Charts.

We've been hard at work researching and designing a Super Bowl graphic, and in doing so, have stumbled upon an idea for predicting the success of NFL offenses. I know that Football Prospectus and other football statisticians have done work in this area, but as of yet I haven't seen too much done to visualize the data. So this afternoon, I took a bit of time to develop some methods for illustrating it. As Infojocks develops this idea a bit further, I think pairing it with a layer of information to show offensive success is key. But, for now, here are the results for two divisions:



In other news, still a bit astonishing to accurately plug in Ochocinco for the Receiver-formerly-known-as-Chad-Johnson. What a circus.

Spotlight: Baseball infographics Part I.

Well, with NHL and NBA wrapping up fairly spectacular playoff seasons (aside from the forgettable Lakers–Magic finals) and the NFL still filling the void before training camp with idle Favre chatter, American sports fans turn their attention to baseball for a few months. To try and make this yawnable event a bit more exciting, here’s a collection of baseball related infographics and visualizations I dug up for inspiration. Most people who follow the infographics community closely will recongize most of these, but they are still worth collecting all in the same place. Check back tomorrow for Part II, with infographic work from newspapers and a handful of interactive graphics.

Flipflopflyball Baseball Culture Infographics (Craig Robinson)



Major League Ballparks Four Generations (HistoryShots)


Chicago Cubs: A Century of Suck (600 Series)


History of the New York Yankees (Alex Reisner)


Baseball Pitches Illustrated (Lokesh Dhakar)


Again, remember to check back tomorrow for some great examples of newspaper baseball infographics. Know of work missing from this list? Be sure to leave it in the comments.

Graphing success.

After determining the formula for the Cities of Champions graphic, the next important step was finding ways of illustrating the histories of those franchises. Because this poster was about Cities of Champions, we were mainly concerned with graphing success and not failures. Whatever technique we graphed success with, I had hoped failures would be clearly indicated by empty space. After all, sometimes nothing speaks louder than a blank space in the win column. Just ask the 2009 Detroit Lions or any of the last sixteen (and most likely future twenty) renditions of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Because our formula took into account league championships, conference championships, playoff qualifications, and winning seasons, we wanted our charts to clearly illustrate those factors.

Our first few attempts played with using a combination of icons and colors to represent those factors. After illustrating a few cities with these techniques, we took a step back and evaluated what was successful and not successful about this effort. First, it was a step towards being a valuable reference because it clearly displayed the postseason success of each team. However, it lacked two things: it was hard to see trends and winning seasons were not illustrated.




For our second attempt, we took a step back to reevaluate how to best show trends. Briefly, we looked at using color and only color to graph championships. While the results showed a lot of potential in showing trends, especially in the opportunity to overlap team successes on top of each other for city summary charts, the reference aspect of the poster was lost. Championships were shown through a darker color, but overall they were harder to identify.


Having come close on two efforts but convinced there had to be better options out there, nearly simultaneously two things happened. One, we realized that a bar chart for games above .500 was the perfect way to show trends of success. Two, we re-stumbled upon Edward Tufte’s excellent work in developing his sparklines. On his website, he has an excellent discussion of the graphs, which he describes as “intense, simple, word-sized graphics.”

Liftoff. After figuring out how to relate winning percentages in all the sports to each other through a little math, we had our answer. Combining sparklines with the icons and colors from earlier efforts provided the perfect way to illustrate trends and serve as a reference. While our finished graphs are not exactly the “word-sized” ones that Tufte defines, they are definitely an effective marriage of multiple layers of information in a compact space. We hope to apply this technique outside of the Cities of Champion graphic and will keep you updated about those developments.

Graphic: NFL Teams of the Decade.

Today I saw an article on Sports Illustrated prompting a preliminary discussion what NFL team takes the crown for Team of the Decade. In the article, Don Banks postures that if Pittsburgh can repeat as Super Bowl champions, then they can stake a legitimate claim to the crown. He then goes on to rank the teams from 1-32. I wasn't quite sold on the order of his rankings (at least at the top) and was curious to see if Pittsburgh could make any statistical claim to the crown so I played with the numbers.

Banks took into consideration regular season records, playoff records, winning seasons, playoff seasons, and Super Bowl records. So rather than guess at the rankings, I threw the numbers into a pretty simple formula. The points awarded for each category are listed beside the color label. I graphed the top ten and got slightly different rankings than Sports Illustrated.



According to the formula, it's also impossible for the Steelers to get more points than the rival Patriots even if they win it all and New England reocrds a losing season.