December 16, 2014
College Football's Richest Teams
The data comes from smartycents.com. I would encourage you to read their article if you're curious to know where all of this money comes from. It's pretty fascinating just how big of a business college football has become.
Initially, I was going to create the viz for this post in Tableau, but I was reading the Interactive Inspiration article on Visualoop and saw this ad for infogr.am:
The ad reminded me of Datawrapper, so I thought I would give it a try. I must say I was super impressive with infogram's simplicity. In just a couple of minutes, I registered for an account and had this nice interactive chart.
- Auto-sort the bars based on the metric selected
- Color the bars by a dimension, conference in this case; This would allow me to highlight that 5 of the top 10 teams are in the SEC.
- Hide the axis; I don't need it on this view since I'm labeling the bars directly.
December 11, 2014
Makeover Monday (on Thursday): How one of the richest teams in college football makes & spends its money
- They are pie charts, which makes comparing the slices difficult.
- The slices are not labeled with the amount, so I have to make some guesses as to their contribution to the whole and then multiply that by the total shown in the titles. That's way too much work.
- There are categories missing from the source data.
- Why are these in two separate articles since they are a related story? Why aren't they combined in a single story?
- There's no mention of the profit the football team turns.
 |
| NOTE: This is an update of the original chart based on feedback from Nelson Davis. Nelson suggested making the bar sizes relative across the charts, which my first version failed to do. |
First, I need to give a special thanks to Emily Kund for reviewing this viz and providing some great feedback. For example, it was her idea to use the Alabama official colors in the viz. Thanks Em!
- Bring the revenue and expense data into the same view
- Provide a high-level overview, including profit
- Rank the categories in descending order, except for "Other", which I prefer to place last in the sort
- Include the actual amounts by labeling the bars
November 7, 2011
Makeover of a Makeover – Waterfall vs. Side-by-side Bar Chart
One of the great things about the data viz world is that people are always willing to listen, learn and share. Cole Nussbaumer over at storytelling with data (a great blog you should follow) recently conducted a visual makeover on some horrible charts submitted during a class she was teaching. and she was willing to share her data with me so that I could make my own viz. Where else do you experience such camaraderie?
The improvements she recommends are fantastic, but I recommended one improvement to this chart she created:
Typically when I see side-by-side bar charts I’m looking to compare the bars that are next to each other. However, in this case, the bars are not necessarily related; they are simply a list of expenses and income next to each other. I recommended she create a waterfall chart like this one done with Tableau:
To me, a waterfall chart communicates the expenses vs. income story of this data more effectively
- The bar sizes make comparisons easy. It’s clear that Programs are the largest expense and Grants are the largest income.
- You can easily see the total variance without having to do the math in your head.
- Other Expenses are much larger than Other Income. I wonder what’s included in those expenses. Looks like an area for investigation.
- This group should probably focus a bit more on Sponsorships so that they’re not so dependent on Grants.
I could have included labels for all of the bars, but I wanted to show the patterns and relative sizes without the numbers being a distraction.
You can download the original Excel data here and/or the Tableau workbook here.
P.S. I chose red/green bars for two reasons: (1) most people understand red as negative and green as positive when reading financial figures and (2) to annoy my friend Steve Wexler of the Data Revelations blog (another you should follow), who hates this color scheme more than anyone I know.
