The final project of dashboard week for DS53 was to work on the NFL Big Data Bowl 2026 Analytics Challenge. Our task specifically was to create a metric or visual analysis to evaluate NFL player movement during the frames after the ball is thrown. We were advised to keep the focus narrow and impactful, and to use Tableau Prep for any necessary data preparation and dashboard creation in Tableau Desktop. The goal was to communicate player movement insights in a way that would be useful to NFL coaches and understandable to fans.
Planning, researching, and sketching:
A major challenge for this project for me was the subject. I had absolutely no knowledge on American football and it made understanding the dataset tough, as well as coming up with any kind of angle to take for the final dashboard. I decided to keep it simple and realistic of what I would be able to understand under time restraints. I went for creating a match breakdown, and spent a lot of time talking to a football fan understanding what they would want to see after a match has taken place. I took a lot of inspiration from the ESPN match reports and designed a sketch for a breakdown of the Houston Texans vs. Indiana Colts match.
Data Prep
I did some data prep in order to union together the input (before the ball is thrown) frames and user positions, and the outputs (after the ball is thrown). I also kept the input table separately as another lookup table as it had information about the players, and also the supplementary table with minor cleaning. I then related the two lookup tables to the unioned input and output data.
The Final Result:
Knowledge I Would Pass On:
My biggest challenge with this project was with understanding the data and being able to come up with a story. Without speaking to someone with the knowledge and interest in the topic, I'm not sure if I could have produced anything at all, so my biggest piece of advice would be to go and speak to someone!