Introduction

I was asked to give a keynote presentation at the 2019 Tableau Customer Appreciation conference in Dallas, TX. The site of the presentation was AT&T stadium – the location where the Dallas Cowboys play their games. For this reason, I thought this NFL topic would be a fun one to discuss.

Due to technical difficulties, however, I was unable to give this presentation. Rather than waste this opportunity, I made a video of the content I was going to show.

The Examples Shown

The visualizations I chose to present in this article were selected because I saw some significance in the story hidden in the data. There was no roadmap given for us to follow to uncover the insights on how speed leads to success in the NFL. To do this project justice, however, I needed to spend more time exploring the data and bringing some statistical measures into the analysis that would have helped me more conclusively prove my ideas.

The best part of this project for me was being given access to real game data. In about one to two hours, I was able to process the data to produce interactive dashboards that really excited me. I spent the rest of the time exploring player data. One of the problems I had with this project was that it was so fun to move from team to team to compares players and to see how they were similar or different. It was a big time sink, in a good way!

The Powerful Combination of Alteryx and Tableau

This project once again proved to me how powerful the combination of Alteryx and Tableau is in attacking large, complex data.

My Top 5 most important characteristics of Tableau:

1. Speed of visual analysis (no pun intended).
2. Efficiency
3. Robustness
4. Beauty
5. Visualization best practices combined with flexibility

My Top 5 most important characteristics of Alteryx:

1. Blazing computational speed (linear performance across massive data)
2. Comprehensive solution techniques
3. Excellent product documentation coupled with repeatable, and reliable workflows
4. Massive functionality that works in harmony across the categories of data analysis and prep, predictive analytics, geospatial operations,  and demographic data
5. Easy to teach, easy to learn, easy to become proficient in a short amount of time

The Presentation of How Speed Leads to Success in the NFL

The Play Animation Video

Click here to watch an animation of a play rendered in Tableau.

The Powerpoint File

Processing_NFL_Player_Speed_and_Position_Data_final