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The Super Bowl is finally upon us this evening, with the Kansas City Chiefs taking on the Philadelphia Eagles. It should be a cracking competition between one of the best individual players to have ever graced the NFL in the KC quarterback Patrick Mahomes; and potentially the most complete team on both sides of the ball in the Eagles. I'm hoping that it lives up to its potential!
First up for the roundup this week is two entries for this month's #GamesNightViz and #SportsVizSunday collaboration challenge.
Ben Norland has created a fantastic transfer planner for spotting the next big star to target for your Fifa 23 team. I really like Ben's annotations on the scatter plot to help make it more interpretable, and showing the whole range of players while also adding a reference line for your chosen budget is really useful for decision making. The comparison that appears when you select a player is really smooth (not to mention the blue star on the scatter!).
Although he created this with Fifa 23 in mind, I actually had a good time just looking at how the players from various Premier League teams are distributed across the scatter plots. There's lots to look at even if you're not a Fifa player!
The second challenge visualisation is Will Sutton's elegant bee-swarm for the 2022 Beer Mile World Championships. Will's design is really clean and top marks for making it into an actual beer can label! That's such an imaginative way to add a bit of extra impact and show more detail like the rules, and I would be a fan of more cans with visualisations on them.
Away from the challenge, Tedy Iskander has visualised Jeka Saragih's journey to becoming Indonesia's first contracted UFC fighter despite his losing in the final. I really like the amount of information that Tedy has shown here, and the breakdown of the fight history, and the W/D/L coloured bars, are good touches.
Kate Brown, formerly of this parish, has produced a wonderful visualisation on the opener of the LPGA tour. In particular, I really like Kate's stacked columns showing the distribution of scores across each rounds. Although I don't follow golf too closely, I think it lends itself so well to being visualised and I always enjoy getting lost looking at the scores across the rounds. I'd be interested to know how the proportion of under-,over- and par scores in this tournament compares with other tournaments, particularly as it was a limited field of previous winners this time around.
Here's a link to the dashboard on Tableau, or you can look at the embedded version below.
And because it's Super Bowl day, there had to be a Super Bowl visualisation in here somewhere! Fortunately, Samuel Epley has carried out a casual 100,000 simulations and visualised the results. In the simulations, the Chiefs won 55.4% of the time which seems pretty close all things considered! Sam's visualisation covers simulated passing & rushing yards among a wealth of other things so check it out if you're an NFL or Super Bowl fan.
Moving into cycling, DataVizMich has made this enthralling animation to show the recent Cyclocross World Championship battle. Being able to see the race unfold lap-by-lap really gives you a different feeling to more static data, and Van der Poel & Van Aert's dominance stands out.
Ansgar Wolsing produced two football visualisations this week, and my personal favourite is this small multiple/trellis/grid showing Haaland's continuing goal-scoring habits (the other was a great treemap highlighting how much of an outlier Chelsea's transfer spending has been). I'm a sucker for small multiple line charts like this because I love being able to see all the data against each highlight. Can Haaland continue or will something slow him down?
Lastly, our very own unstoppable CJ_Mayes has produced another tutorial, this time on using the Strava API to get all your data (as long as you've been recording it on Strava of course!). CJ's produced a series of excellent tutorials and I highly recommend them all, especially if you're interested in learning to use Python too. We'll even let him off initially forgetting the #SportsVizSunday hashtag :-D
That'll be it for this week. Thanks once again one and all, and I hope the Super Bowl brings you everything you want.
Mo & the #SportsVizSunday gang