Top 200 Rushers Data Visualization

Submitted by Chops on

Turns out grozzy isn't the only mgoblogger trying to visualize football statistics.

I am a huge fan of Edward Tufte's books and an even bigger fan of people like Mike Bostock who create amazing interactive graphics for the New York Times. A while ago I thought "why can't we have graphics like those for Michigan sports data?" So I decided to take a shot at it. I'm using d3js, which is the javascript framework Mike Bostock created and I figured out how to scrape ALL THE DATAs for players from the university football stats archive. So I have a really fun dataset all ready to play with.

After a few months of on and off effort I finally put together a website with my first visualization of the top 200 rushers. Please have a look and let me know if you have ideas for other things you would like to see in future iterations. I intend to fiddle with it and make improvements over time and maybe some time I'll make it more interactive like grozzy's MGoUFRVisualization.

I'm still exploring the data but some things I found interesting were how players like Ron Johnson and Tony Boles cranked out a ton of yards in relatively few games. I also don't see any obvious pattern of yards per game going up over a players career. The patterns look pretty random to me. What do you see?

Comments

Chops

December 3rd, 2015 at 10:17 PM ^

I have the opponent names and other data. Think I'll add a TODO to create a hover popup that shows the actual values, opponent, and year when you point at a bar.

Now if you hover over a bar it will display the details below. So you can see the season, the opponent, and all the actual data values behind the chart, including some values I didn't include in the chart itself.

Dudeski

December 5th, 2015 at 12:43 PM ^

This is really cool. I've been wanting to try out d3js for a while, but start up costs seem a bit too high to justify moving away from ggplot. Perhaps next summer I'll invest a few days to learn it.

 

Thanks for sharing.

Galapula

December 6th, 2015 at 10:49 PM ^

I'm in a class right now learning D3 for information visualization and it's really cool to see an example of small multiples of something that is relevant as hell to my interests. Great job with the mouse over interaction and I like the simple but effective encodings for the different variables.