Franchise Season Plots Updated

Check out how your favorite team's fortunes have evolved over the past 14 seasons. The Franchise Season visualization has been updated with 2013's data. It's a fun snapshot of each team's "identity" from year to year, plotting Expected Points Added per Game.

You can examine how SEA has completed its circle of life with its 2013 campaign, covering all possible combinations of good&bad offense&defense. See how DEN's offensive production changed with the arrival of Peyton Manning (or check out IND's 2011 year in the wilderness).

The reigning champions are always the default selections for all our charts and tables at ANS, so this is will be the last week as the default for my hometown team. To me it's interesting to see that they've spent most of their franchise's existence along one axis, ranging from all-world defense/terrible offense to above-average offense/average defense, and won the Lombardi Trophy on both extremes of the axis.

It's rare for a team to sustain above-average production on both sides of the ball for beyond a season or two at a time, even for perennial contenders like NE and IND. PIT might be the best counter-example, with seasons that cluster in the upper-right quadrant consistently through the recent era. Even their "down" years were decent. For example, 2013 saw the Steelers finish 8-8, falling perfectly at the average/average intersection in the plot.

CHI's plot is a really interesting one. They should feature it on Sesame Street. One of these years is not like the other...

It's interesting to see how the average line can appear to be something like the sound barrier to some squads. ATL just can't seem to put together an above average defense, and BUF can barely break the average-barrier on offense.

A smaller version is included below, but the permanent full-size version is available via the Tools | Visualizations menu.

As always, up and to the right is good. Down and to the left is bad. My thanks to Chase Stuart who suggested the idea for this a couple years ago.





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8 Responses to “Franchise Season Plots Updated”

  1. R says:

    St. Louis has been all over the place, their last fourteen years have been a kaleidoscope of shifting emotions

  2. Unknown says:

    You might consider updating the visualization to "connect the dots" from year to year, IE a line connecting 2004 to 2005 and 2003. Makes it easier to track progress over time.

  3. Anonymous says:

    thanks, nice plots.

    a plot with the 14 year avg of all teams would be cool (one point per team)

  4. Anonymous says:

    Cleveland makes me sad

  5. X says:

    This is probably not possible with the default software, but it would be fascinating to have the 50% playoffs contour on the plot. That is, the line above and to the right of which a team has better than 50% chance of making the playoffs.

  6. Unknown says:
    This comment has been removed by the author.
  7. Michael Caton says:

    I'll be happy to join the group requesting other people to do work. :) The all years-all teams plot would be a black mess with or without the paths for each team over time, but you could try an animation of each team over time.

  8. Unknown says:

    Have you looked at the possibility of forecasting based on a teams trend?

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