So it occurred to me that I might not have explained clearly enough what I was looking for in the table and graphic, so I wanted to go over that real quick. In most stories you probably wouldn’t do both, but for this assignment I think it’s helpful for you to think about what information ought to go into both a table and a chart and think about the story you’re trying to tell. How can all three elements of your story—the actual written text, the table and the graphic—help you convey the key message you’re getting across?

Let me start first with an example that doesn’t have anything to do with this assignment. In my graduate class we’ve been talking about where the money comes from and where it goes in college sports. Specifically, the Power Five conferences, particularly the Big Ten and the SEC, take in a ton of money from the NCAA, the bowl games, the College Football Playoff, and their broadcast deals, and they ship it off to their members. Smaller leagues, like the Sun Belt, don’t have the funds to send to their schools, so those schools have to rely on student fees and transfers from university budgets. I think I was explaining this in our class the other day.

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First off, note that this table has a title, chatter, and a source line, in addition to the information in the table itself.

With this table, we can show that first, the total revenue for the SEC is something like 23 times that of the Fun Belt. We also can show that the main reason is that the SEC gets hundreds of millions of dollars from bowl games and television contracts. You could convey that information in a graphic, but it would come out looking something like this:

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This is a great graphic, but it would take you years to read it even if you did know what you were looking at. So the table is a better source of information than a graphic.

For the graphic, think of the story you’re trying to tell. In this case, I’m telling the story about what that difference in revenue means for the SEC and the Sun Belt, so let’s think about it in terms of, does the school generate more money from external sources, like ticket sales, media contracts, bowl games, etc. than it spends on sports? Here’s what we see:

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Here, we have a headline, some chatter, the information, the source line, and also a note explaining something in case anybody wonders why the Commodores are left out. But the other thing I want you to notice is that every pixel in this graphic is conveying information. We have the x-axis showing the schools, ordered by conference. We see the uniformity of million-dollar losses among the Sun Belt schools, and the generally positive but highly variable results for SEC members. And because these are five-year averages, it smooths out one-year anomalies like big coaching buyouts and gives you a stronger sense of what the financial picture is like at these institutions.

So for your assignment, your table might provide a summary of key data. I did a little bit of this on track and field to look at how scholarship budgets might be related to finishes at the NCAA championships. This is what my table would look like:

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You can see that I left teams in there when I didn’t have data for them, to convey that there is some missing information and so you can’t take what I’m showing as absolutely definitive. You’d want to explain that in your story if you decide to go that route. But this gives you the basic data I’m working with.

And now here’s the graph I put together. I did this in Excel rather than Google Sheets just because it’s easier to do some of the design work there. There’s also a good app called

Datawrapper.de⁠

that I find really useful and Holland likes one called

Raw graphs⁠

, so feel free to play with any of those to make this look a little nicer.

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With this graphic, at first blush, you don’t see a whole lot. Georgia is an outlier with a decent number of points and a pretty low budget, so that’s interesting. Other schools may have a ton of athletes and be better suited to win conference championships than score points at nationals—Georgia was only eighth on the men’s side and fifth on the women’s at SECs this year, but was third on the women’s side and eighth on men’s at the natty. And it’s clear that you don’t have to spend more to score more, so that’s what I’d build my story around.

But also think about the unique aspects of your sport and the teams you’re looking at. With track, each team is only going to have a small number of individuals qualify for the NCAA championships and a teeny number that could score—you qualify by placing high at a regional semifinal and only eight athletes per event score points. So you can win with a pretty small number of athletes.

And that’s the case here. Georgia scored all its points in this meet with a total of 9 athletes plus a relay team in 12 events, spending $1.3 million. Because it has so few, it doesn’t need to stretch its scholarship budget out across a wide range of athletes. On the other hand, Alabama scored 49 points with six athletes and a relay, but also with a budget of $2.2 million. So I have an interesting story here about different recruiting strategies that I could talk to a sport administrator or possibly a coach about.

So that’s what I’m looking at for you all to do here. Get your findings and try to figure out why things are the way they are. Then as you talk to folks, see if your hunches are right or wrong, and how that explains the institution’s strategy for your sport and other non-revenue sports. You can go ahead and building the graphics and the table now, which is why I have that due earlier than the story itself. The ‘why’ belongs in the story.

As always, let me know if you have any questions, and I hope this is helpful.

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