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.

Position Leaders Visualization

I made a Tableau viz to illustrate last season's ANS Player of the Year Awards. The idea was to see just how far from the pack the very top performers stood at each position. For fun I also included previous seasons. Now I've finally gotten around to setting up an automated update process so that we can see the position leaders as the season develops. The viz is permanently available under the Graphs | Visualizations | Position Leaders menu link. Like the other visualizations, it will

It's no surprise where Peyton Manning ranks, but check out LeSean McCoy on the RB page. One thing you can use this plot for is to see which teams, players, and squads are likely to regress. for example. If you look at the QB chart, you can see that Cutler, Tannehill, and Locker have WPA numbers that far exceed what we'd expect given their EPA numbers. Recall that they each had game-stealing TD passes so far this season, inflating their WPA. It's likely that they'll return to earth over the course of the season and we'll see their respective logos drift down toward the trend line.

Likewise, we would expect guys who can produce yards and points but not a lot of WPA to drift upward on the WPA axis. This would include Newton, Romo, Eli Manning, and Ponder (if he recovers from his rib injury and gets his job back). I guarantee it!*

*Guarantee not an actual guarantee.

Running Back Stat Visualizations

Running back stat graphs are now available. The graphs are, for now, identical to the quarterback graphs. There are four tabs. Two present RB performance for a particular year, broken out by game and opponent. The other two tabs present RB performance totals by year. Any combination of RBs can be selected. The available seasons go back through 2000.

One handy tip is to use the search function. Don't bother scrolling up and down the list of players. Just click on the (tiny) search icon in the upper right corner of the player filter area and type the first few letters of the player's last name.

Another tip--To clear the list, select (All) and then deselct (All). Now you have a blank canvas and can begin to add whichever players you'd like to compare.

The site menus have been updated so navigation to the visualizations are always just a click away. Happy vizzing.