I like sports. I do not get too crazy about the people or the drama; I just love playing them and really enjoy analyzing them. Especially when I can crunch some data with visualization software like Tableau Public.
Sometimes I just wander out into the wilderness of raw numbers with no compass and no plan. Just Tableau under my arm. Thinking of questions, creating charts, and seeing what happens.
Tableau is so nice. It is super simple to use, and you can create beautiful charts with it. This makes it very fun to explore data. If you use or are considering some data analysis software in your business, I highly recommend you try it out.
The Seahawks are my home team. Their recent string of success makes it fun to crunch numbers on them. Call me a bandwagon data junky. To be fair, who wants to spend time seeing how bad a team is?
One thing I like to do is check power rankings. Brian Nemhauser of Hawk Blogger has a data-based power rankings formula that I particularly like. Brian calculates team strength each week for each team by running their cumulative season numbers through the formula. Then he ranks the teams according to their team strength value. He has been doing this consistently since 2010.
As an example of what you can do with Tableau, let's take a look at a few charts I made in just a few hours using Tableau Public and the Hawk Blogger Power Rankings data (plus some last three weeks data I had to go grab myself from Team Rankings).
This next chart shows the season overall team strength numbers (cumulative) for each week of the 2014 season (left) compared to team strength numbers for just the last three weeks (right). This allows us to see how each team progressed throughout the season against how each team finished.
There is a lot of variance in the team strength numbers at the beginning of the season. The data appears to settle about a quarter to halfway through. For the Seahawks in particular, it sums up the season pretty well: strong, but erratic start, a fall to mediocrity, and a super strong finish.
<a href="#"><img alt="Hawk Blogger Power Rankings " src="https://public.tableau.com/static/images/Ha/HawkBlogger_PowerRankings/HawkBloggerPowerRankings/1_rss.png" style="border: none" /></a>
I was then curious how each playoff team's entire season numbers compared to how they finished. With just some quick tweaks to the chart on the right above we can see which teams are hot (or not) heading into the playoffs.
The gray bars show the season overall numbers. The blue bars show the last three weeks numbers.
The three teams that jump off the page to me are Dallas, Seattle, and Carolina. Dallas and Seattle continued their late season surge. Carolina played like a different team. Detroit and Arizona, on the other hand, both tripped across the finish line. Green Bay stayed pretty steady.
<a href="#"><img alt="Hawk Blogger Power Rankings - Comparison of Season Overall to Last 3 Weeks - 2014 " src="https://publicrevizit.tableausoftware.com/static/images/Ha/HawkBlogger_PowerRankings/HawkBloggerPowerRankings-ComparisonofSeasonOveralltoLast3Weeks-2014/1_rss.png"/></a>
Lastly, I decided to take a look at the power rankings over the years. I created a weekly view and a season end view for both team strength and rank from 2009/10-2014. The rank charts are particularly telling. It is interesting to see how the Seahawks took a dive through 2010 (which resulted in the firing of Jim Mora and hiring of Pete Carroll) and then slowly built their way back up to the top through 2011 and 2012. They found themselves at or near the top for most of 2013 and have struggled to defend that position through 2014.
<a href="#"><img alt="Hawk Blogger Power Rankings - Over The Years " src="https://publicrevizit.tableausoftware.com/static/images/Ha/HawkBlogger_PowerRankings/HawkBloggerPowerRankings-OverTheYears/1_rss.png"/></a>
Note that the formula has gone through a few revisions over the years. For example, look at how the spread of the weekly team strength data expands towards the end of 2012.
Pictures are so much more powerful than numbers. Tableau allows you to create powerful visual stories with your data.
From this...
To this...
I hope you enjoyed this diversion from the normal bits about websites and business.
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