Updates: I’ve updated the graphs with the latest data here.

The latest visualization is focused on college football, not because there’s not enough articles written about college football (there are), but because there’s lots of interesting data out there and I’m still working on developing my visualization skills.

Anyway, the title of the post is a bit of an understatement, really. Stanford Junior running back Bryce Love has started the year in unbelievable fashion, totaling more than 1000 yards in 5 games. He’s picked up where Christian McCaffrey left off, helping to make Stanford football really fun to watch.

The scatter plot above shows total yards and yards per attempt for the top 100 running backs in college football this year so far. It also shows how far beyond all other backs that Bryce Love has been.

The graph below shows Bryce Love’s (and other top running back’s) rushing total compared with all 130 FBS (essentially Division 1-A) teams. The graph is initially zoomed in, but you can zoom in and out to see the full FBS field. Bryce Love has exceeded the rushing total of all but 20 FBS football teams (one of which is his own team, of course). That means he has rushed for more yards than 110 other teams (including 9 of the Pac-12 teams). Impressive. He’s on pace to beat Barry Sanders all time rushing record.

Since there are games weekly, I’ll be updating these graphs to reflect the latest data and hopefully see Bryce Love continue to impress. Go Stanford!

Also here’s a video just so you can link the data with the actual running and playmaking:



Source: Data is from College Football Statistics

Data collection and manipulation are done with Python, Excel and Javascript.