With the 2021-2022 NFL season nearly upon us, I wanted to take a look back at the past winners of he NFL Super Bowl. Every football team has their own unique combination of talent, coaching, management, injury circumstances, fan support, along with a host of other factors.
I wanted to find out if there were any similarities in the successful NFL teams in the recent Super Bowl winning teams.
Since great teams are good at multiple aspects of the game, I figured that I needed a visualization that demonstrated that multiplicity. I had come across what are called radial/spider charts a few weeks back and I thought this would be a good opportunity to practice use of these charts. There is a feature that allows you to organize the data in the shape of a star so hereafter I will refer to them as star charts.
Next thing I needed were football stats that I felt represented traits of a good team. Because of the limitations of the star chart, the stats needed to be all on the same scale. So I couldn't use for example a team's 30 points per game of scoring offense and also their 300+ yards gained per game because those numbers are not on the same scale and would not convey to scale on the star chart.
So I decided to use stats that were based off a percentage or out of 100. I decided upon the following stats: Winning Percentage, Quarterback Rating (QBR), Percentage of Touchdowns scored while in the Red Zone, Percentage of Defensive Stops on Third Down and the Percentage of Time of Possession.
I found the QBR and winning percentage stats on Espn.com and Teamrankings.com is where I found the other percentage metrics.
Resulting is the star charts I made. Feel free to play around with the selections and see what insights you find!
One of the additional features I like in this visualization is that you can combine all the star charts on top of each other. When you do so you can see that the stars are mostly aligned. This to me shows that good teams have similar high performance in each of the following metrics.
I also enabled a sort feature that you can see the star charts of all the Tom Brady teams he has won the Super Bowl with and the Super Bowl winners who had "other" as their starting QB. Man that guy wins
Another interesting insight I got were the 2016 Denver Broncos, 2013 Baltimore Ravens, and 2012 New York Giants had smaller 'stars' than the other Super Bowl winners. Remembering back to those teams, the Broncos were carried by the final season of their star QB Peyton Manning, the Ravens were carried by their star defense led by the fearsome Ray Lewis and who can forgot the 2012 Giants who ended the Patriots near perfect season by Eli Manning's playoff heroics and the helmet catch by David Tyree.
Overall, I thought this was a good exercise for me to practice star charts aka radial/spider charts. It is a visualization that isn't widely used but I think it serves its purpose well of showing multiple categories of one entity.
Let me know what your thoughts are if there is anything you want to see more of.
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