Workout Wednesday: Cumulative Passing Yards for NFL QBs

Nice challenge from Emma this week! She’s a massive NFL fan and since the Super Bowl is upon us, she decide to challenge us to create a common baseline chart that shows the passing yards for QBs in the NFL over the course of their careers. Go to her blog for the full challenge details.

First requirement was to filter to QBs that had played at least 3 seasons and had at least 2000 total passing yards. I did this by adding a data source filter. The benefit of doing this is that my Player list will now only include those that meet the criteria and I won’t need filters elsewhere.

Next, I created a LOD calc to get the first year for each QB.

I built upon that calculation with this calculation that gives me the number of seasons played per QB. This goes onto the Columns shelf.

The cumulative passing yards is merely a running total table calc set at the Year level. This goes on the Rows shelf.

I put Player on the detail shelf to get a line per QB. I also put Year and Yds on the Detail shelf since I need those for the tooltip.

Next was a parameter to pick a QB and use that to highlight the QB chosen. I then created a simple calculation that check the Player again the parameter and put that on the color shelf.

Last was the dot on the end of each line. To do that, I created a calculation that checks if it’s the end of the line and the player selected and, if so, return the cumulative passing yards. Since this is a nested table calc, it’s important to set both table calcs to compute using Year.

Some tidying up, adding the footnotes and I was done. I decided to float all elements on the dashboard to ensure they would render exactly as I wanted them to. Another fun week of learning something new! Thanks Emma!!