This chloropleth shows the density of NCAA women’s basketball tournament qualifying teams. I tried to use an NCAA blue-adjacent color scheme. The most teams in this year’s tournament came form North Carolina, indicated by the darkest blue color. A few states had no qualifying teams, which are indicated by a grayed out color.
The map I drew consists of San Antonio, San Marcos and Austin, Texas, where all of the women’s tournament games took place. I gave a little more info by including a table showing cities, stadiums and which rounds were hosted by each site.
This map was rather difficult, as the Austin and San Antonio city limits are rather ridiculous, sometimes extended further out by roads to other incorporated areas. The Colorado River was also “fun” to draw, as it gets very thin in parts and disappeared from the map I used to draw it.
For my project, I focused on the history of IU football. The last two seasons, mediocre by the standards of major football programs like Alabama, Ohio State or Florida, have been some of the best in IU’s history. The program seems to be turning a corner, and there’s optimism the program will continue to grow and continue to win under head coach Tom Allen.
I wanted to make sure that my graphics looked at how historic Allen’s last few seasons have been, and always wanted to include some kind of overarching graphic at the top to prove that fact. I settled on coaching win percentages since the amount of games played each season has changed dramatically over the years, and win percentage is just a fairly simple calculation that’s consistently regarded as a measure of a successful coach. Even better, the sportsreference.com site calculates this for us each season. I also limited the calculation for just the first four seasons of a coach’s tenure because Allen has been here only four years, and I wanted to compare his win percentage (.550) to other coaches in their first four years as well. Some coaches didn’t make it four years at IU, so I noted that. I highlighted the coaches who were better than .500, or coaches who won more than they lost, in an IU red, and added a callout with their full names, win percentage and the first four years of their coaching career at IU. To additionally draw readers to those coaches, I muted the colors and included only coaches’ last names, though I had to stagger them into two rows so that all of the names could be seen.
In my second chart I wanted to show how IU became, statistically, the worst team in college football history, and how hard it will be to change that statistic. I used a line chart to show the total wins, losses and ties, which were eliminated in 1996 (noted with a callout). I added. a gray backdrop to every other decade so it was easier to read the graphic and understand which decades were good, bad or otherwise. I also added a callout to show where Allen’s tenure has come in IU’s history, using a box. You can see that the trajectory of the lines start to change under Allen, but it will take long-term success to get IU to the point where it has more football wins than losses.
For my final chart, I tried my hand at a radar graph, using the sportsreference.com data to chart various offensive and defensive statistics over Allen’s time at IU. There’s nothing particularly notable, but it was an interesting way to display otherwise rather boring data.
Luckily, data was easy to find. I also stuck with my graphic style throughout the semester, using Boomer Condensed for all of my text, and a fairly IU-centric color scheme, which happen to also be my favorite colors (although that didn’t factor into my decision to enroll here). I’m very happy with how this turned out. I tried a few different chart types for each of the examples, and one point was a little concerned how it would turn out, but now that’s it’s completed I’m quite proud of it.
