As you may have noticed by the chart at the top of the front page, the visualizations unveiled late last season are now up and running for 2012. As a refresher, there are four sets of visualizations. Each set can always be accessed through the Graphs|Visualizations menu. Each visualization is interactive. You can select seasons, players, teams, weeks, etc. Hovering over a team symbol or player will show enhanced details.
The team stat viz plots each team's performance on an x-y graph. Good defense is up, and good offense is to the right. So teams on the bottom left are your thoroughly bad teams. There are tabs to see Expected Points, Win Probability Added, and Success Rate. Plus, there's a tab that just looks at team offense and one that just looks at team defense. On those two plots, running is measured on the vertical axis and passing is measured on the horizontal axis. Like the other plots, up and right are good. Below each main plot you'll see a chart of week-to-week performance. You can choose any season since 2000 to look at. You can also narrow down the span of weeks to examine. For example, if you want to look at the 2011 Texans with only T.J. Yates starting at QB, you can move the left slider from week 1 to week 13. Or if you only want to see regular season performance move the right slider to week 17.
The next visualization is for franchise EPA since 2000. You can select a team and see how they've trended in offensive EPA and defensive EPA in the past 12 years. For example, you can see the Giants' best teams over the past several years were not their 2007 or 2011 championship squads.
The other two visualizations are for player stats. For now, there are just QB and RB visualizations. The Quarterback viz offers many different presentations. There is a plot of QB career cumulative WPA from a QB's first year through his most recent year. It's an interesting way to compare the career arcs of top passers and see how younger QBs are keeping pace with some of the top older guys. There is also an "Nth best season" EPA plot, which takes some thinking to understand. It plots each selected QB's season in order from best EPA season through worst EPA season, which is another interesting way to compare careers. The other tabs present year-by-year EPA and game-by-game EPA for selected seasons. There are two alternative plots for those, a bar chart and a line chart.
Lastly, the Running Back viz presents the season-by-season EPA and game-by-game EPA for selected RBs. The cumulative career total WPA and Nth best EPA plots don't work too well for RBs because their careers are so inconsistent.
Enjoy these. Crazy that Pittsburgh's D has been 31st in D success rate.
If i recall the franchise viz was your idea, Chase.
Good stuff. Thanks.
Total newbie question. Is the data that underlies the visualizations available for download? I see the download link for tableau, but that doesn't appear to be the hard data. I see the play by play data available. But I don't have the skill to parse it, nor the skill to recreate the WPA, EPA, SR%, etc., on a "rolling" basis, so to speak, that can be done on the visualization charts. I also see the stats pages which have all of those metrics--but only on a total season basis (as far as I can tell). Maybe some context of what I'm hoping to do will help.
I'd like to be able to query the performance of teams with certain statistical characteristics at the time they had those characteristics. So, for example, let's say I wanted to estimate the "next game" performance of all teams that had losing records but were in the top 10 AYPA going into the game (bad example, but hope it helps). Presumably, I would need data that matched current record with the team's AYPA rank going into the next game, and the query would show all games that fit that profile. But the only way to linke record and AYPA rank is to have a "running" AYPA as the season progresses. It appears the data behind these visualizations basically does something like that. And obviously, the stats page right now would give me the running total of all teams through week 5 of this season. I'm curious if there's a way to filter that for say last year after week 5, and so on and so forth.
Full disclosure: As I'm sure this note make fairly clear, I'm not only a newbie to ADVNFLSTATS but also to DBs. So I may not even be thinking about it the right way. Bottom line, I'm just wondering if whatever data is behind these visualizations is available or if its proprietary.
Nevermind my post. I think I figured it out from the viz page and tableu download. I continue to be amazed at how freely you share this information. As a Moneyball enthusiast just getting into advanced stats for football, this is a cornucopia of information I couldn't possibly have generated myself. Much thanks!