Okay, so yesterday I was messing around, trying to figure out something about Saquon Barkley’s rushing stats. I mean, the guy’s a beast, right? I wanted to see his average rushing yards, like, REALLY see them, not just a number on ESPN.
First things first, I hit up the usual suspects – Pro Football Reference, ESPN, the official NFL site. Got a bunch of numbers thrown at me, but it wasn’t clicking. They give you the season averages, career averages, but I wanted to dig a little deeper.
Then I thought, “Why not just build my own little data set?” So, I started copying and pasting. Yeah, I know, super old school. I went game by game through his career, pulling his rushing yards from each game off of Pro Football Reference. It took a while, like a good hour or two, just clicking through seasons and games.
Next step: Spreadsheet time! Dumped all that data into a Google Sheet. Column A was the date, Column B was the opponent, and Column C was the rushing yards. It was messy, lots of scrolling, but hey, it’s my data now!
After that, I used a simple AVERAGE formula in Google Sheets. `=AVERAGE(C:C)` BAM! There it was – his average rushing yards per game for his entire career. Pretty cool, but I didn’t stop there.
I wanted to see how his averages changed over time. So, I filtered the data by season. Used the same AVERAGE formula for each season to get his average rushing yards for 2018, 2019, etc. That’s where things got interesting! You could really see the impact of injuries and different offensive schemes on his performance.
Made a quick chart in Google Sheets, just a simple line graph showing his average rushing yards per season. Suddenly, all those numbers turned into a story. You could see the rookie year explosion, the dip after the injury, and the gradual climb back up. Data visualization, baby!
- First I collected data.
- Then I organized it.
- After that, I calculated averages.
- Finally, I visualized it.
It wasn’t anything fancy, no Python scripts or fancy analytics tools. Just good old copy-pasting and some spreadsheet magic. But honestly, I felt like I understood Saquon Barkley’s rushing performance way better than just reading a headline.
Takeaways
This little exercise taught me that sometimes the best way to understand data is to get your hands dirty. Just diving in and manipulating the numbers yourself can reveal insights you’d never get from a pre-packaged statistic. Plus, it was kinda fun!
