Pele greatness

For South China Morning Post, Victor Sanjinez and Dennis Wong used a visual story to show why Pele was so great at football and in life. Illustrations mixed with a few charts makes for a good explanation of the-man-the-legend’s career.

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Role of luck in football wins

NFL Football Operations calculated how much luck has contributed to team wins and losses this season. They considered four actions that involve a lot of randomness: dropped interceptions, dropped passes, missed field goals, and fumble recoveries. Then they took the difference between expected win probability and the chances of the actions to calculate lucky wins and losses.

Normally I live in a football-free household, but someone joined a fantasy football league, which has a way of turning non-fans into obsessive stat checkers.

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Charts showing Tom Brady’s standout career

Tom Brady announced his retirement from the National Football League, which ends a long career that stands out from the rest. As required by law, when it comes to sports records over time, The Upshot made four line charts that show cumulative stats for Brady and his peers.

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How well players drafted in fantasy football

For The Upshot, Kevin Quealy used a heatmap to visualize fantasy football draft picks:

This variance is widest for quarterbacks, whose pick patterns are so distinct you don’t even need to read their names to know they’re a quarterback. Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, named the N.F.L.’s most valuable player last season, represents the most obvious example of this pattern, with a roughly equal likelihood of being drafted in any of the first 40 picks in the draft, including No. 1 over all.

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Fantasy football draft rankings, with weekly projections

Football season is starting soon, which means many will participate in the age-old tradition of the fantasy football draft. For the Washington Post, Neil Greenberg and Reuben Fischer-Baum have your back:

Your fantasy football draft sets a season-long foundation for your team, but its ultimate result will be based on the weekly performance of your roster. That’s why The Washington Post is adding weekly point projections (using PPR scoring) to its draft rankings, based on a player’s role in his team’s offense and the difficulty of the matchup.

Look at all the players or pick a position and quickly get the rankings.

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Searching for the saddest punt ever, with statistics

For SB Nation, Jon Bois takes a statistical deep dive in the search for the saddest punt in football. It’s an hour long. It’s a surprisingly fun watch. At the very least, even if you don’t like football, you can glean some analysis and storytelling lessons from it.

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NFL draft performance vs. expectations

Reuben Fischer-Baum for The Washington Post looks at professional football expectations given their draft picks versus performance.

By comparing how much value teams should get given their set of picks with how much value they actually get, we can calculate which franchises make the most of their draft selections. Approximate Value (AV), a stat created by Pro Football Reference that measures how well a player performed overall in a season, is useful here. Based on this metric, we find that the Browns draftees have underperformed in the NFL given their draft position, especially when compared to the draftees of a team like, say, the Seahawks.

My main takeaway is that teams seem to know what they’re gonna get. Overall at least. Save a few teams who outdid expectations and a few who failed pretty badly, everyone else sticks towards the baseline. But it’s also really random year-to-year, which is essentially what makes sports interesting.

See also the player-level comparison for professional basketball from last year.

And, just a random observation, it felt weird reading this sports piece with “Democracy Dies in Darkness” at the header of The Washington Post site. But maybe that’s just me.

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Football catches visualized

It’s always fun to go back to sports articles and graphics that were a lead-up to a game the day after. The newest addition: this graphic from The New York Times that shows wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr.’s catches this season. It shows route patterns, the catch, yards after the catch, and touchdown paths. If you’re not into football, just take it in as a small multiples example.

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History of Earth in the context of a football field

In the latest addition to the put-big-numbers-in-context genre, here’s the history timeline of our planet in the context of 100 yards.

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Bayesian fantasy football 101

Bayesian fantasy football

There's a small site dedicated to Bayesian-informed fantasy football decisions, because of course there is. Here's the 101 intro.

Here's the crux of thinking probabilistically about fantasy football: for any given week, when you start a player you're picking out one of these little x's at random. Each x is equally likely to get picked. Each score, however, is not. There are a lot more x's between 0-10 points than there are between 20 and 30.

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