Graphic: Starting quarterbacks in NFC North.

Brett Favre's signing with the Minnesota Vikings officially tarnished the relationship between number four and the Green Bay Packers fanbase that saw him start 253 consecutive games under center. During that time, the Packers' divisional foes—the Vikings, Lions, and Bears—started 48 different quarterbacks. With those three teams again expecting new starting quarterbacks (Cutler with the Bears, Stafford with the Lions, and Favre with the Vikings), Favre suddenly finds himself on the other side of that statistic.

(click to enlarge)

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.

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.