Graphic: History of the Super Bowl.

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.

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Graphic: Perfect games. Part two.

So just how rare and incredible an accomplishment is a perfect game? Since 1969, 12 men have been privileged enough to walk on the lunar surface, representative of the greatest achievement in the history of man. In the same time span, only 9 men have pitched perfect games. Mark Buerhle joined an incredibly selective club with his perfect gem on July 23.

Graphic: Perfect games. Part one.

Of course, I'm a little late on this, seeing as how it's been a month since Mark Buehrle threw his outstanding perfect game (incredibly followed up by another six perfect innings in his next start). However, perfect games are so rare, I couldn't help but take an opportunity to do a bit of research on the feat. More isotype graphics to follow about how rare Buehrle's game is.

Interesting to note that the first reference of a perfect game came in 1908 from I. E. Sanborn in the Chicago Tribune. Concerning Cleveland pitcher Addie Joss's perfection against the White Sox, Sanborn described "an absolutely perfect game, without run, without hit, and without letting an opponent reach first base by hook or crook, on hit, walk, or error, in nine innings."

In addition, being from Pittsburgh, I've long been aware of the incredible 12 perfect innings pitched in a loss by Harvey Haddix. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a great write up about the game known as a "perfect loss." For a listing of more perfect and near-perfect games, check out the graphic below.

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.

Spotlight: The Chicago Cubs 'Century of Suck'.

As the Cleveland Cavaliers approach another meltdown capping off 45+ years of total sporting ineptitude for their city, it is important to remember the team that owns the market on sports-suckiness. The folks at Infoshots have compiled this wonderfully styled timeline of just how Chicago has managed a complete Century of Suck. Being a young pup myself, I only remember a few of these sucky moments, so it is neat (and a bit sad) to see how long they've been going on.

On a similar and not exactly timely note, last fall I threw this small graphic together about how the Cubs and White Sox have managed to both miss the postseason since their joint appearance in the World Series in 1906.

Weekly Graphic.

Weekly Graphic.