Makeover Monday: The Highest Paid Positions in the NFL

Today was a perfect day to practice the “time-boxing” technique I use for makeovers. I worked on this as I headed to Northampton to teach a Tableau Fundamentals course for a customer. The train journey from Euston to Northampton is 57 minutes, and I completed this makeover in 42 minutes.

Ok, here we go. First, the chart to makeover today was by Cork Gaines of Business Insider.


I really like the idea behind this chart: understanding the salary distribution of NFL players by position. However, there are a few problems with this chart:

• The labels are vertical, making them harder than necessary to read.
• It took me a while to understand the sorting; the chart appears to be sorted by average salary.
• The salaries are only for the top 10 in each position, which means the min, avg and max are all relative to those 10 players.
• The labelling feels like it’s cluttering the chart.

To address these concerns, I’ve created the viz below. In my version, I’ve made the following changes:

• Changed the labels to horizontal
• Added options for sorting the viz by any of the metrics and allowing the user to pick a sort order
• Added a filter for the team the position belongs to
• Changed the chart from a bar chart to a dot plot/DNA chart
• Moved the labels into the middle of the dots, where they fit, and removed the $ symbols
• Changed the colours to use the offical NFL colours

This was a pretty simple and quick makeover that I feel provides a much more meaningful and insightful visualisation.