New Orleans Saints and Data Visualization

It's Friday, so here's a non-work-related blog posting.

I grew up in New Orleans, so I have been a Saints fan since 1967 when the team was founded. For international It's Alive in the Lab readers, the New Orleans Saints are the professional American football team from my old home town. This year, the team is competing in its 50^th season. When they started, they were a really bad team. For a brief period, they were really good and actually won the Super Bowl for the 2009-2010 season. Since there's been a mix of good and bad, I wondered how many times they have had a winning season.

I found the win/loss/tie information on Wikipedia and made a chart so I could visualize the data.

A side-effect of this graph is that you can see that the Saints haven't had a game end in a tie since 1973. This is much less likely to happen today since games can be extended up to 15 minutes in an attempt to break ties at the end of regulation. Though this graph leveraged the Saints gold and black uniform colors, it was not easy to tell how many winning seasons they have had.

So I decided to try graphing the data another way.

That made it pretty obvious, but then I was curious if maybe an infographic would be the way to go:

Enlarge

Actually, the best approach is probably to do a direct comparison.

Unlike the second graph, this one has more information as you can infer how many games there were in a season. You can see that the schedule was expanded from 14 games to 16 games in 1978 and that there were shortened seasons in 1982 and 1987. But if you think about it, the lines show the relationship between the previous season, the current, and the next. That doesn't matter. All that matters is whether or a season is winning or not. So maybe I should just have the dots?

In this last graph, you can easily spot the 12 gold dots that are above the blue dots. You can also infer how many games there were in a season.

I look forward to a winning season, but they lost their opening game to the Oakland Raiders, my current home team, so if I were a betting man, based on what I see in this data, it's not looking so good.

Charts are alive in the lab.