Last week, the New York Times published online an interactive tool to explore NFL draft picks, revealing the fact that there's not much relationship between an early pick and the star performers in the season:
Kevin Quealy, graphics editor at the NYT, detailed the process behind creating this graphic on his chartsnthings blog. He and others on the graphics team used the R language to rapidly sketch many different options before this final version was settled upon, and it's fascinating to see the creative process in action. The resolution and space afforded by the print edition allowed for an even more information-dense graphic; compare the detail of the final print version (below, top) with the R version (below, bottom):
The Times regularly uses R to develop its online and print data visualizations. Other recent examples include investigations of the Facebook IPO, the wealthiest 1% of Americans, and Mariano Rivera’s pitching prowess. You can find the details of how these and other visualizations were created with R at the chartsnthings blog, linked below.
chartsnthings: Charting Skill and Chance in the N.F.L. Draft (via Sharon Machlis)
While the visualizations are nice, I think they kind of miss the point. Not only are you concerned with the odds of picking up a high skill player, NFL teams should also be concerned about how much they're paying for those odds. It seems to me that many teams pay way too much for the first pick. Imagine you could draft 10 players for the cost of one first rounder - your value may be higher in the second case.
Statistics should be about comparisons, and in this case I don't think the comparison should be talent between rounds, but value between rounds.
Posted by: Sean | May 02, 2013 at 08:06