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Hi, Sports Fans!
Already a month into 2022 and as we head into February we have a new and exciting Sports Viz Sunday monthly challenge to be unveiled. More on that to follow soon!
Some of my sporting reflections for January. Trying to rationalise another demoralising showing from England in the Ashes. Usually, these kind of defeats are a catalyst for change but having witnessed similar results over the past few series in Australia I wonder if we are back in a cycle that will take some time to recover from.
The fallout from Formula 1's world championship decider in Abu Dhabi left a somewhat bitter taste in what had been an amazing season. One thing's for sure though, rarely has there been such anticipation into a new F1 season with both significant rule changes promising to deliver more exciting racing and the next phase in the duel between Hamilton and Verstappen. I'm certain Hamilton will continue despite what has been mentioned, I can only imagine he will relish this battle and will use what happened last year as extra motivation to try and achieve that historic 8th championship.
While Manchester City have established a stranglehold on the English Premier League it's the other type of 'football' from across the Atlantic that's bubbling up nicely. Just two weeks to go until the 56th edition of Super Bowl and 4 teams are still in the mix. American Football is very much on my 'must do better' list in terms of knowledge so if anyone has any 'American Football for Beginners' guides please send them through!
Moving swiftly onto this weeks content. We are deep in #IronViz season but that hasn't stopped some great pieces from coming through. First up we'll start with an entry into our January challenge by our very own Mr Simon Beaumont. A slightly different approach this time from Simon moving away from the more traditional dashboard/longform style to deliver this navigational beauty. Everything about this viz oozes slickness and quality with so many little tricks that it really is worth a download to check out how it's put together. My favourite element is the little bar charts at the end of the various dot index plots.
Now onto the rest of the submissions, we'll dive first into American Football, our most vizzed sport this week. Jeff Plattner explores the history of the Conference Championship, the final hurdle before Super Bowl. Jeff looks at how many times each team has participated, gone on to win and how they faired in the Super Bowl. Lovely layout and design, very easy to understand and interesting to follow the fortunes of the teams. It seems the Cincinnati Bengals making it this far is somewhat of a surprise having only twice made it this far before. Nice one Jeff!
Philip Sprinkel has us reaching for the hats, scarves and gloves in looking at which NFL quarterbacks perform best in sub-zero temperatures. Aaron Rodgers clearly seems to be way out in front when it comes to coping with the freezing ball and bitter bone-crunching tackles but spare a thought for Mike Glennon. He had the worst quarterback performance, of anyone, since 2011 whilst playing in a temperature of 24F / -4C! Very interesting Philip, thanks for sharing this unusual lens on the game.
Sports Viz Sunday regular, Samuel Epley is another who takes a look at the Conference Championships and has simulated the result of the Cincinnati Bengals vs Kansas City Chiefs. In Samuel's simulation, the most common scoreline has The Bengals triumphing by 3 points. Either way, it looks like it's going to be an exciting game. Great piece of analysis, Samuel, running 50,000 simulations of this result and displaying the outputs in a very nice dashboard.
Samuel has gone on to produce a similar piece of analysis for the other Championship game between San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams. Samuel has the 49ers edging the Rams 24-20 and therefore going on to meet the Bengal's in the Super Bowl. No need to watch now, right?!
I think this is the first time I have seen something like this. For a period of time, Ninad Barbadikar opened up a 'request line' and allowed people to request comparison statistics for any of their favourite attack minded players across a number of Europe's top leagues. Check out the Twitter thread for some interesting requests and outputs. Great service, Ninad!
I love a good network diagram to explore and this effort from Matthew Antoline is no exception. Matthew looks to solve the debate on which MLB Pitchers should be in the Hall of Fame by grouping pitchers with comparable similarity scores together. Certainly worth diving into this one with a good deal of interactivity on offer as well to explore this interesting subject.
This viz has already got a lot of love from the Twitter community and it's not hard to see why. For a first viz published on Tableau Public this effort from Tanya Shapiro really is excellent. Tanya analyses the Watt output from the various Peloton classes which is organised by both the instructor and the type of class taken. Nice use of annotations and excellent use of images combined with a crisp and clear design, top marks indeed, Tanya. I don't recall seeing too many Peloton related vizzes despite the boom in popularity over the last couple of years. Maybe this will inspire others to share their Peloton experiences?
It's been great to see how James Smith continues to build up his D3 knowledge and how this F1 Constructor Stream graph continues to evolve. Judging by the comments on his tweet, it looks to be getting pretty complicated now! D3 looks so classy, I enjoyed playing around with this one. I wonder what iteration is next......
Bill Shander asks the question "Are your Olympic Dreams Over at 50?" In this wonderfully slick interactive web-based piece, Bill takes us through the journey to explore and answer the question. Visually engaging and very interesting, a great piece of work and one that provides hope to those edging on in life. If only I could ride a horse!!
Don't get confused! There is a sports viz down at the bottom of this thread. Vivek previews the Mens Australian Open Tennis Final by taking a look at Rafael Nadal's performance in Grand Slams and has such confidence that he has already declared Nadal the victory to claim his 21st Grand Slam! Very nicely down, Vivek and a good use case for plotting data on an image concept, doing this with the Nadal logo works well.
In other sports-related content, Peter McKeever has added European Tour golf information to go alongside the PGA Tour. This is an excellent exploratory tool allowing comparison across the upcoming tournament and also the opportunity to compare selected players. It looks as though Rory Mcilroy has the slight edge going into the Dubai Desert Classic.
Thanks to Tina Covelli for sharing this tweet with the Sports Viz Sunday team. Here, John Foley writes an article accompanied by visualisations from Tina and Nicholas Kollauf exploring whether the ban on Baseball pitchers being able to use foreign substances on the Baseball (known as the Sticky Stuff Ban) had any impact on the pitcher's variety and armoury. A really interesting piece to read through.
Finally, for those that like to analyse their running data in Strava, this blog post on Medium from Andriy Yaremenko shows how to animate those running tracks in QGIS. The end result looks pretty good.
That's it for the round up. Great work everybody and look out for the February Challenge which will very soon be with us.
Simon